Fragmentary Nature: DJ Spooky Speaks!

Next week, Xpress will be running a story on a free class given at UNCA by a most interesting lecturer. Paul “DJ Spooky” Miller has long been on the very far edge of DJ culture, pushing the medium in new directions, while collaborating with everyone from Yoko Ono to Chuck D. But, it’s his work as a writer and thinker on the impact of remixing and sampling on modern art that has made his career unique. In addition to being a globe-traveling musician and lecturer, Miller is also the author of the book Rhythm Science, and is a faculty member at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

The following interview with Miller was conducted via e-mail last week.

Mountain Xpress: In your interview with the Harvard Advocate, you explained your view of history by saying: “At this point, it’s all about collage. Everything we see is made up of fragments of other stuff.” Is it fair to say that this is your vision of contemporary culture in general?

Paul Miller: When you wake up in a different city almost every couple of days for 10 years, you kind of see how digital culture has influenced everything. From Starbucks to iTunes, from quad band cell phones to Satellite radio, from YouTube to liveleak.com, the poetry of the era is information. I think that the whole DJ thing is the way people respond to information overload, and that’s what my book Rhythm Science was about – making art out of the patterns holding it all together. Not to mention, DJ culture updates constantly, keeping up with everything is a collage in its own way. You just float with the scenario. That’s the “mix.”

Xpress:You’ve mentioned in some of your lectures and writing that the dividing lines between art, music, technology and meaning are becoming increasingly blurry. What methods do you use to explain this concept to those who attend your lectures?

Miller: Whenever I create, I pretty much use the same screen – the problem with today is that we think about everything in 20th century terms. The “screen” of the 20th century isn’t the screen of the 21st. One of my favorite films that covers this kind of thing is Timecode by Mike Figgis—all characters are on screen at the same time, and you just roll with the flow. Doug Aitken’s show at MOMA in NYC was kind of an update of the same thing—the art of being simultaneous. The 21st century screen is everywhere – your iPod, your windshield in the car’s GPS unit, the cell phone, the laptop, Times Square. I make art that reflects that – sampling lets you move from screen to screen, you edit the sequence. So I guess, I just use the same “screen” as anybody else, it’s just that my screen has a lot of screens at the same time. David Byrne and the Talking Heads did the same thing with “True Stories”—it was a skit about millions of characters in search of an author.

Xpress: One of your more notable performance events is Rebirth of a Nation, a remixed and re-envisioned version of Birth of a Nation, which tells a very different story than D.W. Griffith’s original. As a performer and writer, does it concern you that someone might take content you’ve created (or re-created, as the case may be) and twist your intended meaning? Have you ever had this experience?

Miller: Once things are out in the world, you gotta roll with it. You never really know who is going to sample what – and that’s a good thing. The whole “death of the author” and “hyper-reality” issue that Baudrillard and Barthes championed means that the script of the world is what you make up. Composers like John Cage or artists like Marcel Duchamp did the same thing – let it flow through them. I just want to see what happens when you do the same thing with digital media and software, so I guess it’s all about flow. I’m an open source kind of guy. That’s what “mixes” are about – you share and are shared, and every body benefits. It also means that the artist is dead, the composer is dead – we’re all Wikipedia extensions of everybody else, scripting and editing everything we can. That doesn’t mean its good or bad, it’s just the way things are these days.

Xpress: Your writings appear to reflect your general artistic philosophy, combining a variety of seemingly unconnected thoughts, insights, experiences and quotes into a complex idea. As a teacher, do you feel that this is the best way of getting across the concepts you are presenting, or is it more a result of your natural thought process?

Miller: I don’t really have a natural thought process. I’m responding to these questions at 2 a.m. after a 15 hour flight from Tokyo. It’s a well-caffeinated thought process. Philosophy is just the side effect.

Xpress: You’ve spent much of the last few years as a lecturer and teacher on the topic of DJ culture and its impact on communication, technology and art. Have you found many unlikely or unexpected parallels between teaching and performing?

Miller: Nah. It’s all information. It’s either fun or its not.

Xpress: It seems like much of your writing, specifically your book Rhythm Science, reflects a need to show others how to participate in a creative culture based on the fusion of ideas. It begs a larger question, however: Do you believe that creativity can be taught?

Miller: I just produced material on Yoko Ono’s new album, and when I was doing research about her work for the project, I found her reflections on “primal scream” therapy. She applies it in a uniquely Japanese way—if you look at Butoh dance after World War II, and translate it through the 1960’s her voice is the perfect emblem of the late 20th century—beautiful, eerie, precise, and hyper emotional, almost transparent. John Lennon and her relationship was the perfect match of art and pop—we’re all still trying to catch up. Computers help! But yeah, the body in the world, the computer in the net, its all mirrors looking at other mirrors. I want to figure out how to decode the situation with art.

Xpress: If you had to condense the content of your Asheville lecture into a single, basic idea, what would it be?

Miller: Flow. Like Yoda used to say in Star Wars, the force is strong … But, ahem, seriously, I guess it’d be that we all experience things in different ways, sampling opens the door to it all. We are all fragments.

Xpress: How important is collaboration? Is the day of the solitary, individual artist slaving away in isolation over?

Miller: Collaborations are conversations—I work with a lot of people from different scenes and different styles. That’s what makes life fun. I’d be bored other wise. It’s the 21st century—things should be wild! I’m a big fan of people working with other people, the lone computer nerd model is OK, but I like fun parties.

Xpress: I see that Rebirth of a Nation is due for release later this year. Creatively speaking, what’s next for you after that?

Miller: My next film will be a project where I go to Antarctica. I’m going to do a mini studio on the ice for a while and make an audio portrait of the ice. For me, music isn’t music—it’s information. I want people to get an idea of what’s going on in Antarctica, so that’s what I’ll be doing.

Xpress: Although it appears to have been largely well received, Rhythm Science been criticized as being (as one reviewer put it) “an entertaining, if incoherent stream of quasi theoretical polemic.” What was your basic intention with the book, and what were the biggest challenges in writing it?

Miller: Hey, whatever rocks that reviewer’s boat! I can’t speak for anybody (except with their records…). The book is a step into the hothouse world of digital media theory, and there’s no road map, and no signposts. I want people to feel the sense of floating in the digital media ocean. That’s what makes things fun for me. I wouldn’t go back and change anything. Plus it was fun going through my record collection to find rare records of artists like Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp and others for the CD that went with the book. Part of the fun of collecting texts and records is seeing how they unfold. Like I said, flow with the flow, ‘cause it’s good to go. Sound incoherent?

Xpress: Are you still excited by live DJ-ing? Do you see a day on the horizon where you will edge away from live performance?

Miller: When things get boring, I’ll be into my next phase of things. Did I mention that I’m going to Antarctica in a while?

Xpress: When you began your career as a DJ, did you ever expect to be writing books and giving lectures on the artistic merits, impact and higher meaning of the form? Or, have you always wanted to contribute to this artistic discussion on the academic level?

Miller: Nah, I didn’t expect it to go this direction. I just landed from Tokyo, and it’s 2 am. I have a flight to Istanbul at 8pm tomorrow, and I’m writing an obituary of Jean Baudrillard for the Nouvel Obseravateur in France after this interview. It’s all just a hobby gone completely wild. I guess that means I need a little more coffee.