Scientists go to ice fields the way I go to my record collection. Ice is an archive of data from the plantet's hidden past and ready for playback with the right devices.-Paul D. Miller, The Book of IcePaul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky has been remixing sounds, words, and images all over the world ever since he started combining hip-hop and ambient music to form a new genre called "illbient" in the early ’90s in New York's Lower East Side. His newest book, The Book of Ice is pure wild style, a dramatic collage of earth science, eco-criticism, geo-musicology, postmodern theory, photography, poster art and political manifesto.Miller’s currently in Korea for the Gwangju Design Biennial, where his work is being featured. John Eperjesi, an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University, caught up with Miller and asked him a few questions about The Book of Ice.John Eperjesi: Two of your recent projects, The Nauru Elegies and The Book of Ice, have involved traveling to geographically distant and ecologically fragile locations. You seem to be interested these days in creating a remix or combination of soundscapes and landscapes. How did your interest in the ice fields of Antarctica come about?
DJ Spooky: The way the world works these days is that "scarcity," whether of resources or of ideas, creates more value. For me, the more remote a place is, the better. I look at everything as being interconnected. So "remoteness" as a concept is more psychological than anything else. There isn't really a place on this Earth you can't go to. It's just the feel of difficulty that the voyage entails.Antarctica is much harder to get to than Nauru. There are only 2 flights a week to Nauru from Brisbane, for example. But Antarctica—you have to go through military, or science channels to get there. Or charter your own boat, which is really expensive. My book The Book of Ice explores some of the uneasy tensions between remoteness and how a composer would respond to "landscape"—it's just that the whole landscape has shifted way past anything physical. It's all about a certain kind of data aesthetics, and that's what makes this book project fun: the hybridity. I worked with Brian Greene to get the idea of physics in the project – ice is a natural formation of "recursion" and every snowflake is pure geometry, so I wanted to figure out how to condense that into music completions. It's all algorithms.You describe going to Antarctica as a kind of "exploration of geological time, through the prism of sampling." Can you explain this a bit?
This is where we go "digging in the crates" for the DNA of this project. Basically if you are in Antarctica—like anywhere geography has made the landscape "preserved"—you are walking on a huge record. It's a document that has preserved the dust particles, and the bacteria, etc. That's why it's called "ice core sampling" when you drill down into the ice: you are taking a sample of physical time. What’s amazing about Antarctica is that the landscape has preserved this kind of information intact for millions of years. That's why I say, as much as I love the place, every step you take, as an observer, alters the landscape. You bring new bacteria, new breath (literally) and that means the landscape, on a micro-level, has to respond to you as a foreign invader.The ice core sampling process is when scientists try to understand where we HAVEN'T been: no human stepped foot on Antarctica for millions of years, so it's in much better shape than the rest of the planet. We tend to mess everything up… So that's what scientists call "anthropogenic climate change" i.e. human made. So I wanted to figure out a reflection on that in composition, in sound. There's a kind of eerie quality to that, and in a way, my music for this project reflects that austere sense of distance, and uncertainty of evolution. Some influences for this project: I've mixed books and songs, I guess they're all just material for your playlist at this point.Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe: Climate Change: Picturing the Science
David Buckland: Burning Ice
Tim Flannery: The Weather Makers
Charles Ive: Central Park in the Dark
John Cage: In a Landscape
Pierre Boulez: Pli Selon Pli
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Escape from Noise and many many more…And this idea of remixing soundscape and landscape isn't just a metaphor. You actually brought a studio out to the ice fields of Antarctica. Practically speaking, what did that involve?
It was basically a lot of backpack situations: I'd carry photo equipment, computers, etc. out into the ice field or carry them onto a Zodiac ship (small boats we used to go between our main boat and the shore). Practically speaking, it was meant to be as compact as possible, and to be able to capture the environment as I could. Carrying a backpack full of computer gear for a couple of hours is definitely INTENSE! That, plus conditions that were like -45 F were definitely, truly, not downtown…So after you have hiked through the arctic cold to the ice fields with your studio in your backpack, can you describe the process of composing a sound map of the continent?
It's a strange thing to put one foot in front of another and remember that it's all solid ground. In fact, it's downright eerie that the ground is solid. But if you dig deeper, I had stuff like quantum physics going through my mind on this kind of thing: we are just atoms and bits and so is the ground beneath our feet. Ice is just a little more honest about the whole thing!You've been exploring the meaning of islands in your performances recently. What do islands mean to you?
Over the last several years I've spent a lot of time exploring islands as remote as Vanuatu and Nauru in Oceania, to Elephant Island off the coast of Antarctica to Zanzibar or the Svalbard Archipelago in the far northern Arctic Ocean—all radically different, all resonant with the idea of global systems. Where land meets water, a lot of paradoxes arise. When you think of the "idea" of an island, the first thing that comes to mind is the geography. Islands are always considered as isolated, as places sequestered away from the center of the continents that are always nearby, hovering at the edge of the currents that link the different spatio-political contexts that define the relationship between fragment and "whole." Islands are physical metaphors of the networks linking the physical fact of a couple cartographic conceits: they are the stuff of myth—castaways, colonists, indigenous peoples, prisoners, take your pick—and they follow the meta-narrative of colonial expansion that has marked the last several centuries. It used to be that at the edge of the map, we marked the space "here be monsters." Today, our contemporary response would be something like "here there is no GPS signal."
Just think of the whole project as a kind of response to the basic idea of a blank space on the map. Geography and sound are so linked that the "Republic" idea is about how we define nation states is just a mix concept. Graphic design follows that same impulse—look at Malevich and Rodchenko and the revolutionary graphic design that accompanies any major change in a culture. I guess I was going for that with the prints and music notation too. It's seamless.And finally, in the book you write, "Antarctica is a commons that we all share, conscious or not, of the history of the planet." What exactly is the People's Republic of Antarctica?
A fictional state of mind…
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DJ Spooky: The way the world works these days is that "scarcity," whether of resources or of ideas, creates more value. For me, the more remote a place is, the better. I look at everything as being interconnected. So "remoteness" as a concept is more psychological than anything else. There isn't really a place on this Earth you can't go to. It's just the feel of difficulty that the voyage entails.Antarctica is much harder to get to than Nauru. There are only 2 flights a week to Nauru from Brisbane, for example. But Antarctica—you have to go through military, or science channels to get there. Or charter your own boat, which is really expensive. My book The Book of Ice explores some of the uneasy tensions between remoteness and how a composer would respond to "landscape"—it's just that the whole landscape has shifted way past anything physical. It's all about a certain kind of data aesthetics, and that's what makes this book project fun: the hybridity. I worked with Brian Greene to get the idea of physics in the project – ice is a natural formation of "recursion" and every snowflake is pure geometry, so I wanted to figure out how to condense that into music completions. It's all algorithms.
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This is where we go "digging in the crates" for the DNA of this project. Basically if you are in Antarctica—like anywhere geography has made the landscape "preserved"—you are walking on a huge record. It's a document that has preserved the dust particles, and the bacteria, etc. That's why it's called "ice core sampling" when you drill down into the ice: you are taking a sample of physical time. What’s amazing about Antarctica is that the landscape has preserved this kind of information intact for millions of years. That's why I say, as much as I love the place, every step you take, as an observer, alters the landscape. You bring new bacteria, new breath (literally) and that means the landscape, on a micro-level, has to respond to you as a foreign invader.The ice core sampling process is when scientists try to understand where we HAVEN'T been: no human stepped foot on Antarctica for millions of years, so it's in much better shape than the rest of the planet. We tend to mess everything up… So that's what scientists call "anthropogenic climate change" i.e. human made. So I wanted to figure out a reflection on that in composition, in sound. There's a kind of eerie quality to that, and in a way, my music for this project reflects that austere sense of distance, and uncertainty of evolution. Some influences for this project: I've mixed books and songs, I guess they're all just material for your playlist at this point.
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Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe: Climate Change: Picturing the Science
David Buckland: Burning Ice
Tim Flannery: The Weather Makers
Charles Ive: Central Park in the Dark
John Cage: In a Landscape
Pierre Boulez: Pli Selon Pli
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Escape from Noise and many many more…And this idea of remixing soundscape and landscape isn't just a metaphor. You actually brought a studio out to the ice fields of Antarctica. Practically speaking, what did that involve?
It was basically a lot of backpack situations: I'd carry photo equipment, computers, etc. out into the ice field or carry them onto a Zodiac ship (small boats we used to go between our main boat and the shore). Practically speaking, it was meant to be as compact as possible, and to be able to capture the environment as I could. Carrying a backpack full of computer gear for a couple of hours is definitely INTENSE! That, plus conditions that were like -45 F were definitely, truly, not downtown…So after you have hiked through the arctic cold to the ice fields with your studio in your backpack, can you describe the process of composing a sound map of the continent?
It's a strange thing to put one foot in front of another and remember that it's all solid ground. In fact, it's downright eerie that the ground is solid. But if you dig deeper, I had stuff like quantum physics going through my mind on this kind of thing: we are just atoms and bits and so is the ground beneath our feet. Ice is just a little more honest about the whole thing!
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Over the last several years I've spent a lot of time exploring islands as remote as Vanuatu and Nauru in Oceania, to Elephant Island off the coast of Antarctica to Zanzibar or the Svalbard Archipelago in the far northern Arctic Ocean—all radically different, all resonant with the idea of global systems. Where land meets water, a lot of paradoxes arise. When you think of the "idea" of an island, the first thing that comes to mind is the geography. Islands are always considered as isolated, as places sequestered away from the center of the continents that are always nearby, hovering at the edge of the currents that link the different spatio-political contexts that define the relationship between fragment and "whole." Islands are physical metaphors of the networks linking the physical fact of a couple cartographic conceits: they are the stuff of myth—castaways, colonists, indigenous peoples, prisoners, take your pick—and they follow the meta-narrative of colonial expansion that has marked the last several centuries. It used to be that at the edge of the map, we marked the space "here be monsters." Today, our contemporary response would be something like "here there is no GPS signal."
The Book of Ice includes a lot of great visual material: old black and white photographs of exploring expeditions and People's Republic of Anarctica poster art in many different languages. What is the story behind the poster art?
Just think of the whole project as a kind of response to the basic idea of a blank space on the map. Geography and sound are so linked that the "Republic" idea is about how we define nation states is just a mix concept. Graphic design follows that same impulse—look at Malevich and Rodchenko and the revolutionary graphic design that accompanies any major change in a culture. I guess I was going for that with the prints and music notation too. It's seamless.And finally, in the book you write, "Antarctica is a commons that we all share, conscious or not, of the history of the planet." What exactly is the People's Republic of Antarctica?
A fictional state of mind…