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Interactivity will be future of culture, composer, D.J. says |
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Tuesday, 03 April 2007 |
| Paul Miller
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By JIM GENARO
Whereas the 20th century was marked by commoditization of culture and hierarchal models of media distribution, the 21st century will continue to witness greater customization through interactive media, deteriorating geographical boundaries and gift-based, open-source economies, according to Paul Miller.
The
composer, conceptual artist and writer, better known by the pseudonym
“DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid,” shared his ideas about the future of
digital media with a packed audience at UNC Asheville’s Lipinsky
Auditorium last Wednesday night.
His talk was part of the school’s annual Laurence and Joyce Dorr lecture series, “Aesthetics: Thinking Beyond Experience.”
He began by
showing photographs of graffiti-covered trains in New York City from
the 1980s, each one with a unique style of artwork.
He noted that
the artists who painted them were expressing a regional vocabulary — a
set of symbols that would only make sense to people from the same
neighborhood.
Then, as the
trains left, those artists transmitted that vocabulary out into the
rest of the city to be reinterpreted by others who lacked the original
context of the works, he noted.
“Everybody had a
specific voice,” Miller said. The train graffiti was “about public
space versus private identity. These kinds of tags are people’s ...
expression of personal identity.”
Today’s
electronic-music culture has fostered a similar form of communication,
he added, by allowing artistic elements — such as audio samples — that
originate in a specific cultural context to be manipulated, remixed and
reinterpreted by listeners outside of that context.
“Music is the mediation of public and private space,” he noted.
Furthermore, the
Internet has had a profound impact on this blurring of cultural
contexts, he said. The accessibility of information — including art and
music — from anywhere in the world “makes geography almost irrelevant,”
he told the audience.
“You have to think of the idea of the found object,” he elaborated.
This process
begins when a digital artist or DJ discovers a bit of media, such as a
sound bite, a picture file, or some other segment of another artistic
work.
The artist then
manipulates the found object, either by altering it digitally or by
remixing it, and then distributes the final product through the
Internet or by playing it at dance parties. These remixed works then
are open to reinterpretation by new artists, thus completing the cycle.
“There’s these kind of loops and feedback going on,” Miller said.
This also implies that art is shared as a gift — not primarily as a commercial endeavor.
Miller referred to this as a “gift economy ... the idea of being able to trade.”
To that end,
Miller then handed out hundreds of free compact discs of music he had
mixed — one for every person in the audience.
The process of
remixing information can also be applied to political art, he noted. To
make his point, Miller played a video clip that someone had made by
manipulating one of President Bush’s State of the Union addresses.
Using only the actual speech as source material, the clip’s creator had
made a seamless video of Bush making statements such as “We’re ready to
lead the world toward suicide and war. Let’s roll!”
The original speech, Miller noted, was something that “millions of people saw, but everyone had a different version of.”
This ability of
anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to manipulate
information leads to a more active relationship between citizens and
media, he said.
“It’s not just people responding to media — it’s not a passive situation. It’s participatory culture.”
Miller then
brought some local context into his presentation, noting that the
composer John Cage, who taught at Black Mountain College in the 1940s
and 50s, was an early pioneer of remixed art, as exemplified in his
1939 composition “Imaginary Landscape No. 1.”
That piece
consisted of a number of record players simultaneously playing
different sounds. At the time, many audience members were offended by
the idea of prerecorded sounds being used in a “live” performance, but
Miller countered that “That’s the composition — and when you hear all
the frequencies, that’s art.”
This concept laid some of the groundwork for today’s digital media culture, he added.
“The ‘Imaginary
Landscape’ of the 20th century becomes the digital landscape of the
21st century,” Miller told the audience. “The remix is translation ...
You translate what your imagination sees to what someone else has done.”
This reinterpretation process leads to “an uneasy tension between context and content,” he added.
Even the
products people use in their daily lives are part of a similar process,
he noted. Unlike the assembly-line manufacturing that dominated the
20th century, products today often contain parts that were made in
numerous parts of the world.
“This is not
remote,” Miller told the audience. “You all drive cars, you all wear
jeans. But the production source has changed — it’s been outsourced.”
One historical antecedent to today’s DJ culture was the Jamaican “dub” culture of the 1960s, he noted.
Jamaican DJs
would often buy instrumental versions of popular songs and then singers
would overlay their own vocal tracks, which would be mixed with the
original recording to a dub plate — a disc that could then be used to
make copies of the new recording.
This led to a
proliferation of new versions of songs and a vital new music scene —
one that would later have a profound impact on modern deejay culture.
Today, the
ability of almost any form of media to be manipulated, reinterpreted
and remixed has led to “a very tenuous relationship to the idea of
reality,” Miller said.
Contemporary art
and music is “not necessarily about reality. It’s about the remixing of
reality — a sense of irreverence between content and context,” he added.
He noted that even Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed some of these issues in his essay “Quotation and Originality.”
“American pop
culture is this kind of cross-section of weird paradoxes,” Miller said.
“These kinds of collisions of culture are not relevant to the rules of
the past.”
Miller then answered questions from audience members.
“If you could tell our children — the next generation — one thing, what would it be?” a man asked.
“Another world is possible,” Miller answered. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
He added that community and openness are important values for the future.
“The 20th century was the top-down model,” he said. “Our version is the opposite of that.”
“Where do you hope it leads?” another man asked him.
“America is at a
crossroads,” Miller replied. He cited environmental challenges and an
increasingly authoritarian government as some of the major problems
facing the country.
However, he added, “these things can be changed. Everything is transitory and there’s different ways to approach it.”
A woman then asked what role fame has in the type of gift-economy, interactive culture Miller envisions.
He replied that he saw these trends as a “democratization of culture — a delicate step towards this idea of pan-humanism.”
However, he
conceded that it will be hard to get people to “get out of that
American Idol model. People are probably going to read the Enquirer and
live their lives through other people.”
Nonetheless,
Miller noted that the Internet and digital media provide people with
many more options, thus empowering those who wish to be creative with
the means to do so.
One man then
challenged Miller’s notion of the benefits of cross-cultural exchanges,
asking, “As everything gets more mashed up ... is there a threat that
those things can kind of become homogenous?”
“Every culture
has always sampled from other cultures,” Miller responded. “The
Italians didn’t invent noodles. I think the Chinese have something to
say about that.”
He added that
introduction of new cultural elements often invigorates traditions. The
Scots, for instance, developed their colorful kilts from fabrics they
first imported from Japan, he said.
“It doesn’t mean
homogeneity,” Miller added. “It means you have more vocabulary to
express. I could point out countless examples of where you have
cultural appropriation and it’s actually become better.”
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