Cameron Wright
Paul Miller better known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid was at SXSW Eco 2012 with his session The Intersection of Art + Sustainability
Media is the new medium for conservation. Using art to impact the planet, causing a global shift: Academy Award Winner, Grammy Winners and Artists speak on altering awareness on a global scale through media, film, music and design.
He was also on-hand to sign his latest book “The Book of Ice”
“What I have done with this book is to unpack some of the issues that drive my artwork and its relationship to the constantly changing facets of contemporary life in our information-economy dominated, post-everything twenty-first century. Looking back over the last several centuries, an intense amount of energy has been expended all over the world exploring and unraveling the meaning of humanity’s condition on the planet. Much of this energy has been spent in perverse and self-defeating ways. Our vision of modern life is tinged by events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which makes former disasters like the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident or the 1986 release of radioactive steam in Chernobyl seem quaint and self-contained. More than ever, we are interconnected, and interdependent. In the future, regardless of any human action, the planet will be here – we as a species, might not.”
We had a chance to tape a quick interview with Paul Miller/DJ Spooky where we covered the book, his work with Saul Williams and the role that startups play in regards to the environment. (I apologize for the poor lighting conditions and Paul being so dark. This was 100% operator error and a lack of working knowledge to fix this).
DJ Spooky traveled down to Antarctica with his recording studio to record the ice. Out of this trip grew Terra Nova Sinfonia Antarctica a multimedia art project. As described on his site:
Sinfonia Antarctica transforms Miller’s first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. Miller’s field recordings from a portable studio, set up to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress. Coupled with historic, scientific, and geographical visual material, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.
This is his third book, following Sound Unbound: DJ Spooky Explores Remix Culture and Rhythm Science both published by MIT Press. Like The Book Of Ice and Terra Nova, Rhythm Science also included a piece that accompanied it entitled DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation.
