Wednesday, July 23, 2014

DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid aka Paul D. Miller On Music, Multimedia, Philosophy, Cultural Revolution, and the 21st Century Global Village





PAUL D. MILLER aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
(b.1970)
 

Paul D. Miller aka DJ SPOOKY is a composer, multimedia artist and writer. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum and The Wire amongst other publications. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His work New York Is Now has been exhibited in the Africa Pavilion of the 52 Venice Biennial 2007, and the Miami/Art Basel fair of 2007. Miller’s first collection of essays, entitled Rhythm Science came out on MIT Press 2004. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media was recently released by MIT Press in

Miller’s deep interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compilations, remixes and collections of material from the vaults of the legendary Jamaican label, Trojan Records. Other releases include Optometry (2002), a jazz project featuring some of the best players in the downtown NYC jazz scene, and Dubtometry (2003) featuring Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Professor. Miller’s latest collaborative release, Drums of Death, features Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D of Public Enemy among others. He also produced material on Yoko Ono’s recent album Yes, I’m a Witch. Read about his Eco-Artist Retreat project in Southeast Asia, The Vanuatu Pacifica Project.

www.djspooky.com.

Photo Courtesy and Copyright Danielle Levitt.

http://www.djspooky.com/hype.php

DJ Spooky aka Paul D. Miller is the executive editor of ORIGIN Magazine and is a composer, multimedia artist, editor and author. His DJ MIXER iPad app has seen more than 12 million downloads in the last year. In 2012-2013 he is the first artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC starting this fall. He's produced and composed work for Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, and scores of artists and award-winning films. Miller's work as a media artist has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media is a best-selling title for MIT Press. He has been featured everywhere from Elle to CNN to SyFy.

Miller's deep interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compilations, remixes and collections of material from the vaults of the legendary Jamaican label, Trojan Records. Other releases include Optometry (2002), a jazz project featuring some of the best players in the downtown NYC jazz scene, and Dubtometry (2003) featuring Lee 'Scratch' Perry and Mad Professor. Another of Miller's collaborations, Drums of Death, features Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D of Public Enemy among others. He also produced material on Yoko Ono's recent album Yes, I'm a Witch.

DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation was commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival; Spoleto Festival USA; Weiner Festwochen; and the Festival d'Automne a Paris. It was the artist's first large-scale multimedia performance piece, and has been performed in venues around the world, from the Sydney Festival to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater, more than fifty times. The DVD version of Rebirth of a Nation was released by Anchor Bay Films/Starz Media in 2008.

DJ Spooky's multimedia performance piece Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica was commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival; The Hopkins Center/Dartmouth College; UCSB Arts & Lectures; Melbourne International Arts Festival; and the Festival dei 2 Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. With video projections and a score composed by DJ Spooky, performed by a piano quartet, Terra Nova: Sinfornia Antarctica is a portrait of a rapidly transforming continent.

In August 2009, DJ Spooky visited the Republic of Nauru in the Micronesian South Pacific to do research and gather material for The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture., a collaboration with artist/architect Annie Kwon, first presented at Experimenta in Melbourne, Australia in February 2010. In January 2010. Miller was commissioned by German radio to write the composition “Terra Nullius”.

In 2011, Miller released a graphic design project exploring the impact of climate change on Antarctica through the prism of digital media and contemporary music compositions that explored the idea of "acoustic portraits" of Antarctica entitled "The Book of Ice" (Thames and Hudson/Mark Batty Publisher). The Book of Ice is includes an introduction by best selling author and quantum physicist Brian Greene, author, The Elegant Universe. The Book of Ice is a multi-media installation, a music composition for string quartet, and a book, and it has been included in the 2011 Gwangju Biennial, by Korean architect Seung H-Sang and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.

Miller is currently a contributing editor to C-Theory and the Executive Editor of Origin Magazine, which focuses on the intersection of art, yoga and new ideas. He continues his globe-trotting series of live events; playing at festivals from France to Japan to Mexico City; performing solo, with chamber groups, and with orchestras; and giving talks at prominent universities and conferences. He has most recently featured at The Economist “Year in 2012” conference, and for Syfy’s “Let’s Imagine Greater” Igniter web series.


“DJ Spooky cannot be called just a DJ. He is a very accomplished composer. But these days, DJ's are the ones who are bringing fresh sounds to the music world. In fact, they are creating a new spatial music. They are the space transformers of the universe.”
– Yoko Ono in Origin Magazine, Nov/Dec. 2011

“DJ Spooky's new project is the result of an artist literally driven to the end of the earth to investigate a cause of alarm and wonder, and to report back to us in the comforts of a theater.”
– Josef Woodard/Santa Barbara News-Press (review of Terra Nova)

“The Secret Song is the welcome return to recording by one of its most mercurially intelligent musicmakers. It may also be the only concept recording of the 21st century that can be considered crucial listening.”
– All Music Guide, Oct. 7, 2009

“Talk to 35-year-old New Yorker Paul D Miller for too long and you start to feel like a dimwit. This man is as brainy as a Mensa meeting, sharp as Zorro's sword, funny as Falstaff. He is Einstein with a better haircut, a streetwise black Tolstoy, a revved-up renaissance man for the digital age, obsessed with art, information and digital technology.”
- Grant Smithies – Sunday Star Times – Aukland, NZ Nov. 6. 2005

“DJ SPOOKY. Arguably no one is more responsible for propagating and embodying the idea of the deejay as "artist" than DJ Spooky, whose ambitious, elaborate, often hypnotic soundscapes have been notable as much for their eclectic imagination as for their post-modern intellectualism. Both those qualities pervade Spooky's latest collection, "Dubtometry" (Thirsty Ear), which reconfigures and remixes recent deejay-jazz collaborations with jagged breakbeats and hallucinatory dub effects courtesy of the Mad Professor and Lee Perry.”
-- Chicago Tribune, 2/13/04

// Paul D. Miller Biography [doc]
// Short Bios and Quotes [doc]

ITALIAN BIO
GERMAN BIO
CHINESE BIO
JAPANESE BIO
RUSSIAN BIO
KOREAN BIO
PORTUGUESE BIO
SPANISH BIO
FRENCH BIO

// German Interview on CHiLLi.cc
// Italian Interview with Donata Marletta from Digicult


http://djspooky.com/

DJ Spooky receives National Geographic’s 2014 Class of Emerging Explorers Award

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky has been selected by The National Geographic Society as part of the 2014 class of Emerging Explorers, a group of 14 visionary, young trailblazers from around the globe whose innovative ideas and accomplishments are making a significant difference in the world.


READ MORE AT NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Dark Rye/Whole Foods in dialog with DJ Spooky

In celebration of it's new magazine, Whole Foods asked Dj Spooky to share his thoughts on contemporary art, design, and if course, music. 

Their new magazine is video based. Check 'Em out!


http://www.darkrye.com/content/dj-spooky-0

THE REBEL JOURNEY
Featuring DJ Spooky
“Rebels are alive. In past centuries, rebels fought against everything and everyone - today, more than everything and everyone, rebels shine. Yes, rebels shine: reaching for infinity, striving to surpass all limits, to outdo themselves and their own art, character and wit. To shine into infinity is not a small matter: it is the substance of rebels.”

Sponsored by Hogan Rebel & Directed by Giorgio Arcelli Fontana. 

DJ Spooky performs with his DJ Mixer iPad App.
Origin Magazine
http://www.originmagazine.com/

Paul D. Miller is Executive Editor of Origin Magazine, a progressive Artist owned and operated periodical that comes out every two months.

Check us out!

데이터를 문화로!!!
DJ Spooky Residency: Seoul Institute of the Arts
Paul D. Miller aka Sj Spooky is
Artist in Residence at Seoul Institute of the Arts 2013-2014

Free Download: The first Limited Edition Album from DJ Spooky's residency at the Metropolitan Museum

Out now on Jamendo:


DJ Spooky Seoul Residency Trailer (VIDEO):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARAC0hI3Ryo



Published on March 21, 2014
DJ Spooky at LA MOMA / Culturehub.
Video Trailer.

More at http://www.djspooky.com/
More at http://www.culturehub.org/


Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky at REFEST 11.30.2013
from DJ Spooky 3 months ago / Creative Commons 

This is the live-mix of a work in progress showing of "Seoul Counterpoint" a collaboration between DJ Spooky, CultureHub and the Seoul Institute of the Arts. This is the capture of the whole show that was livestreamed.

Video courtesy of CultureHub (culturehub.org/)

 

DJ Spooky concert live between Seoul Institute of the Arts and La Mama/Culture Hub in NY on the Internet featuring two live ensembles. One, at Seoul Institute of the Arts guided by Professor Kang Un-il, the other in NY featuring Sound Impact Ensemble. 

The concert is cached at http://www.culturehub.org/live1



"Silent film scores were grandiloquent, meant to heighten what we saw on screen. Mr. Miller's score, by contrast, deflects our responses, then alters them. A hip-hop drum beat pulses. (It sounds African and urban American.) A wash of industrial sound is joined by bells and cymbals; a dissonant violin; blues fragments. These are the sounds of history and racial complexity that Griffith tried to suppress."
--Margo Jefferson, New York Times, July 8, 2005

"Arguably no one is more responsible for propagating and embodying the idea of the deejay as "artist" than DJ Spooky, whose ambitious, elaborate, often hypnotic soundscapes have been notable as much for their eclectic imagination as for their post-modern intellectualism."
-- Chicago Tribune

"This man is as brainy as a Mensa meeting, sharp as Zorro's sword, funny as Falstaff. He is Einstein with a better haircut, a streetwise black Tolstoy, a revved-up renaissance man for the digital age, obsessed with art, information and digital technology."
--Sunday Star Times – Aukland, NZ

Village Voice Blogs Interview: June 09
Trace Magazine Blog Interview: July 09

Beta Trailer for DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation

Notes for Paul D. Miller's “Rebirth of a Nation” - remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.”

By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Travel. Big picture small frame, so what’s the name of the game? Symbol and synecdoche, sign and signification, all at once, the digital codes become a reflection, a mirror permutation of the nation…. Where to go? What to do to get there?

Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to simply tell it as a story. It’s been a while since late one autumn afternoon in 1896 Georges Méliès was filming a late afternoon Paris crowd caught in the ebb and flow of the city’s traffic. Méliès was in the process of filming an omnibus as it came out of a tunnel, and his camera jammed. He tried for several moments to get it going again, but with no luck. After a couple of minutes he got it working again, and the camera’s lens caught a hearse going by. It was an accident that went unoticed until he got home. When the film was developed and projected it seemed as if the bus morphed into a funeral hearse and back to its original form again. In the space of what used to be called “actualités” – real contexts reconfigured into stories that the audiences could relate to – a simple opening and closing of a lens had placed the viewer in several places and times simultaneously. In the space of one random error, Méliès created what we know of today as the “cut” – words, images, sounds flowing out the lens projection would deliver, like James Joyce used to say “sounds like a river.” Flow, rupture, and fragmentation – all seamlessly bound to the viewers perspectival architecture of film and sound, all utterly malleable – in the blink of an eye space and time as the pre-industrial culture had known it came to an end.

Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order. The end product on this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several micro-seconds – a soundbite reflection of a process that’s a new update of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the German proto Expressionist 1920 film “Der Golem,” but this time it’s the imaginary creature is made of the interplay fragments of time, code, and (all puns intended) memory and flesh. The eyes stream data to the brain through something like 2 million fiber bundles of nerves. Consider the exponentional aspects of perception when you multiply this kind of density by the fact that not only does the brain do this all the time, but the millions of bits of information streaming through your mind at any moment have to be coordinated and like the slightest rerouting is, like the hearse and omnibus of Méliès film accident, any shift in the traffic of information can create not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking. Literally. Non-fiction, check the meta-contradiction… Back in the early portion of the 20th century this kind of emotive fragmentation implied a crisis of representation, and it was filmakers, not Dj’s who were on the cutting edge of how to create a kind of subjective intercutting of narratives and times – there’s even the famous story of how President Woodrow Wilson when he saw the now legendary amount of images and narrative jump cuts that were in turn cut and spliced up in D.W. Griffiths’s film classic “Birth of a Nation” called the style of ultra-montage “like writing history with lightning.” I wonder what he would have said of Grand Master Flash’s 1981 classic “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel?”

Film makers like D.W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Oscar Michaux, and Sergei Eisenstein (especially with his theory of “dialectal montage” or “montage of attractions” that created a kind of subjective intercutting of multiple layers of stories within stories) were forging stories for a world just coming out of the throes of World War I. A world which, like ours, was becoming increasingly inter-connected, and filled with stories of distant lands, times and places – a place where cross cutting allowed the presentation not only of parallel actions occurring simultaneously in separate spatial dimensions, but also parallel actions occurring on separate temporal planes – in the case of Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” four stories at once – and helped convey the sense of density that the world was confronting… Griffith was known as “the Man Who Invented Hollywood,” and the words he used to describe his style of composition -“intra-frame narrative” or the “cut-in” the “cross-cut” – staked out a space in America’s linguistic terrain that hasn’t really been explored too much. Griffith’s films were mainly used as propaganda – “Birth of a Nation” was used as a recruitment film for the Ku Klux Klan at least up until the mid 1960’s, and other films like “Intolerance” were commercial failures, and the paradox of his cultural stance versus the technical expertise that he brought to film, is still mirrored in Hollywood to this day.

But if you compare that kind of flux to stuff to Dj mixes, you can see a similar logic at work: it’s all about selection of sound as narrative. I guess that’s travelling by synecdoche. It’s a process of sifting through the narrative rubble of a phenomenon that conceptual artist Adrian Piper liked to call the “indexical present:” “I use the notion of the ‘indexical present’ to describe the way in which I attempt to draw the viewer into a direct relationship with the work, to draw the viewer into a kind of self critical standpoint which encourages reflection on one’s own responses to the work…”

To name, to call, to upload, to download… So I’m sitting here and writing - creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed geographic regions – reflect and reflecting on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapidly moving into what I like to call “prosthetic realism.” Sight and sound, sign and signification: the travel at this point becomes mental, and as with Griffith’s hyper dense technically prescient intercuts, it’s all about how you play with the variables that creates the artpiece. If you play, you get something out of the experience. If you don’t, like Griffith – the medium becomes a reinforcement of what’s already there, and or as one critic, Iris Barry said a long time ago of Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “history itself seems to pour like a cataract across the screen…”

Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip things around. With a culture based on stuff like Emergency Broadcast Network hyper edited new briefs, Ninja Tune dance moguls Cold Cut’s “7 Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” to Grandmaster Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” to later excursions into geographic, cultural, and temporal dispersion like MP3lit.com – contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experience on a daily level – a density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929 spoke of when he was asked about travel and film:“the hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of suspect dramatic or psychological past” Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them? Travelling without moving. It’s something even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” wouldn’t have thought possible. But hey, like I always say, “who’s counting?”

Uploaded on Oct 2, 2007:
DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, internationally recognized musician, writer, and conceptual artist, recently performed at the Dallas Museum of Art in celebration of the exhibition Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America. Before his performance, he spoke with Museum staff about the influence of artist Marcel Duchamp on his work and career.
http://youtu.be/1_jtK-WRegA




Uploaded on Feb 27, 2008:

DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) talks about the history of media and thoughts about media in culture. He discusses and demonstrates the unexpected side effects of free speech, law, and copyright while showing the power of remixed art. The future and meaning of remix culture is discussed.

(From lecture/performance in 2008 at the University of North. Carolina):



DJ Spooky in 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Spooky

DJ Spooky
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information
Birth name    Paul D. Miller
Also known as    That Subliminal Kid
Born    1970 (age 43–44)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
Genres    Electronica, nu jazz, dub, reggae, illbient, trip hop
Occupations    Disc jockey
Music producer
Years active    1996 – present
Labels    Asphodel Records, Thirsty Ear, Universal Studios, Synchronic
Associated acts    Dave Lombardo
Website    djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller (born 1970), known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author. He borrowed his stage name from the character The Subliminal Kid in the novel Nova Express by William S. Burroughs. He is a Professor of Music Mediated Art at the European Graduate School[1] and is the Executive Editor of Origin Magazine .

Contents

1 Career
1.1 Other work
2 Discography
3 References
4 External links
4.1 Interviews

Career

Spooky began writing science fiction and formed a collective called Soundlab with several other artists.

In the mid-1990s, Spooky began recording a series of singles and EPs. His debut LP was Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Spooky contributed to the AIDS benefit albums Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip (1996) and Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon (1998) produced by the Red Hot Organization. Riddim Warfare (see 1998 in music) included collaborations with Kool Keith and other figures in indie rock like Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.

He returned in 2002 with Modern Mantra. That same year saw the release of Optometry, a collaboration with avant-jazz players Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Guillermo E. Brown and Joe McPhee. In a classical vein, he collaborated with the ST-X Ensemble in performances of the music of Iannis Xenakis.

DJ Spooky collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto on projects including The Discord Symphony. The concert and album were released as an enhanced CD containing both a full audio program and multimedia computer files. It features spoken-word performances by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Patti Smith, David Sylvian, DJ Spooky, David Torn, and Bernardo Bertolucci.

He collaborated with Iannis Xenakis on the recording of Kraanerg, with the STX-Ensemble in 1997.

2005 saw the release of "Drums of Death", DJ Spooky's CD based on sessions he recorded with Dave Lombardo of Slayer. Other guest artists include Chuck D. of Public Enemy and Vernon Reid of Living Colour. The record was co-produced by Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto.

DJ Spooky joined the 9th[2] [3] and 11th[4] annual Independent Music Awards judging panel to assist independent musicians' careers. He was also a judge for the 3rd Independent Music Awards.[5]

DJ Spooky has said that much of his work "deals with the notion of the encoded gesture or the encrypted psychology of how music affects the whole framework of what the essence of 'humaness' [sic] is... To me at this point in the 21st century, the notion of the encoded sound is far more of a dynamic thing, especially when you have these kinds of infodispersion systems running, so I'm fascinated with the unconscious at this point."[6]

Other work

His work as an artist has appeared in a variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; the Venice Biennale; the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum; Paula Cooper Gallery; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and many other museums and galleries. In 2007 his work appeared in the Africa Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennial. This remix of music from Africa was also distributed freely online, and promoted by the blog Boing Boing. "You give away a certain amount of your stuff, and then the cultural economy of cool kicks in," DJ Spooky said.[7]

In August 2009, DJ Spooky visited the Republic of Nauru in the Micronesian South Pacific to do research and gather material for a project in development, with a working title of The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture.[8]

DJ Spooky's multimedia performance piece Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica[9] was commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival; the Hopkins Center for the Arts/Dartmouth College; UCSB Arts & Lectures; Melbourne International Arts Festival; and the Festival dei 2 Mondi in Spoleto, Italy.

DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation was commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival;[10] Spoleto Festival USA; Wiener Festwochen; and the Festival d'Automne a Paris.

In 2010, Miller formed The Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation, a contemporary arts organization dedicated to exploring dialog between Oceania and the rest of the world.

Discography

Main article: DJ Spooky discography
References[edit]
Jump up ^ DJ Spooky / Paul D. Miller Faculty page at European Graduate School and is the Executive Editor of Origin magazine (Accessed: June 4, 2010)
Jump up ^ MicControl[dead link]
Jump up ^ "Top40-Charts.com". Top40-Charts.com. Retrieved 2012-02-08.
Jump up ^ "11th Annual IMA Judges. Independent Music Awards. Retrieved on 4 Sept. 2013.
Jump up ^ "Independent Music Awards – Past Judges". Independentmusicawards.com. Retrieved 2012-02-08.
Jump up ^ "ªªHyperdub¬¬¬¬¬Softwar". Web.archive.org. 2004-07-03. Retrieved 2012-02-08.
Jump up ^ Kirsner, Scott (2009). Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age. Boston, MA: CinemaTech Books. p. 99. ISBN 1-4421-0074-5.
Jump up ^ "The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture". Djspooky.com. Retrieved 2012-02-08.
Jump up ^ "Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica". Djspooky.com. 2010-05-11. Retrieved 2012-02-08.
Jump up ^ "Rebirth of a Nation". Djspooky.com. 2005-07-08. Retrieved 2012-02-08.

External links:

Official website
Sound Unbound site
Rhythm Science site
"SonarText" by DJ Spooky in 21C
DJ Spooky at the Internet Movie Database
The Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation

Interviews:

DJ Spooky on SYFY Channel: Imagine Greater
Azadi: Dj Spooky Shows Support For Iranians' Freedom Quest
2008 interview with DJ Spooky at Some Assembly Required
"Blurring the Boundaries with DJ Spooky," Bowdoin Magazine profile
Bad at Sports podcast interview
DJ Spooky talks The Secret Song
2001 interview with Roy Christopher
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