Michael Workman

Hundreds of people in a dark room watch quietly as three huge screens project silent, colorless images from a terrible American past. A black woman stands in chains under the raised arms of a wizened crier in black cape standing at the auction block, hands raised as if casting a spell. Fade to fingers yanking flowers of cotton in a vast field as men in tails and top hats walk between them. A black slave girl spits at her master. Here come the clansmen. They ride in tall and proud, white ghosts of virtuous power and fearless domination, blood defenders of their land and women. Who will defend them against these night-skinned animals? Proud, angry men on harried steeds gallop out from the dusk, riding out in tall pointed white hoods and tunics. Light from the screens fill the room, illuminating the faces of audience members watching a tiny black man just below the screen, almost imperceptible through the dark glare, face dimly blue-lit from the glow of computer screens.

It's Spooky, as he calls himself, and he controls it all: this remixed cinema history, this music radiating out like a signal from so many satellites. Watch him now as, hand outstretched to an LP, he cocks an eye at the screens above where a group of clansmen stare back down at a thin young black man curled in a ball on the ground. Pause. It's his choice what happens next, these images, this sound--and it's our choice, too, we're told. "Revise and correct," intones a professorial male voice. "These signs." A chorus of chanting voices, meditative and sure, rise up in song against the beat, now almost a military march. But in the fight for freedom the battle depicted onscreen has already been won. It's the next that concerns him most.

"My whole motto is that another world is possible, it's just how do you make it real?" asks conceptual artist and musician Paul Miller, otherwise known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. "I think that artists need to help our culture dream different dreams and that's where I'm coming from." Right now, suggests Miller, maybe our dreams are a little too skewed in the wrong direction. Are there unspoken rules about music, for instance, rules about what a black sound should sound like and what a white sound should sound like? Do these different types of music perpetuate or reinforce stereotypes about race that cause us to think in specific ways about American culture? And if that's true of music, do similar presuppositions hold true of film? Visual art? Academia? If there's any truth to the idea then maybe, as Miller explains it, the time has come for a remix.

As DJ Spooky, Miller's known as a turntablist credited with inventing a dark, discordant offshoot of what's known as intelligent dance music (or IDM) that has its roots in techno. IDM depends on a slower, more contemplative rhythm than the machine-like beats and dancefloor-centric sound of techno; DJ Spooky's variety, known as "illbient," takes its name from the "ill" ambience of the roaming, prodding sound that's become his trademark. Miller's equally known and respected for his work as a conceptual artist, ever since his first solo exhibition "Death In Light of the Phonograph: Excursions Into the Pre-Linguistic" at New York's Annina Nosei Gallery, a show that helped enlarge upon Miller's reputation as an artist capable of operating in a wide range of disciplines. He often refers to himself as a "social sculptor," and frequently reminds interviewers that "phono/graph means sound/writing."

And writing certainly has a central place in his work as well. Much of his expansiveness has its roots in Miller's philosophy education at Bowdoin College in Maine, and his work as a DJ draws from a diversity of artistic disciplines as seen through a philosophical lens. "My whole thing is about thinking about music as an abstraction of philosophy," Miller explains. "Philosophy's already pretty abstract and how you put together your life thinking about things is like living philosophy and that's my basic idea and what my book is about. I just wrote my first book, `Rhythm Nation,' it's out on MIT Press. The whole idea was to write about how philosophy became music and music became philosophy."

It's a notion that applies directly to what's been described as a kind of synaesthesia in his work, a joining of the artistic disciplines at a common horizon. Miller's chosen means of expressing that juncture between the arts is the remix. "I would say that twenty-first-century remixes are updated by how what's musical can be visual and what's visual can be musical. It's all on the same screen." That unifying vision of technology applies equally to Miller's work with art, music and even film. "To me, there's not really a boundary between film and music. I use a computer to make music, to write, to make all of these things. It's about creativity. It's not necessarily about this or that genre. You can look at architects like Frank Gehry, for instance--you know he makes all these weird crumbled-looking buildings. All he has to do is crumble up a piece of paper and have it scanned into his computer and he can make a building out of it. Or look at Richard Serra, who makes these huge metal sculptures. All that's done on a computer. Basically, he'll just make a file and send it to some huge metal foundry and three weeks later you get a seven-ton piece of steel at your front door. It's the same thing."

In a series of performances under the title "Rebirth of a Nation," Miller has been touring with a remixed version of the infamous D.W. Griffith film, "Birth of a Nation." This weekend Chicagoans will have an opportunity to attend a performance when Miller stops at the Museum of Contemporary Art. "Rebirth of a Nation" is presented on projection screens while Miller performs below, a situation reminiscent of the grand old cinema palace practice of adding musical accompaniment to silent films. And it's a project that situates his border-crossing art squarely into the category of race as identity politic. Griffith's film was racially delicate from the start: prominent black intellectual W.E.B. Dubois was one of the first to protest when Griffith's three-hour film, based on the books "The Clansmen" and "The Leopard's Spots" by Reverend Thomas Dixon, premiered in 1915. It paints a glorified portrait of race hatred, filled with miscegenation fears, violence toward slaves and the perpetuation of crude racial stereotypes. The film's popularity got a boost from Hollywood starlet Lillian Gish--the actress who pioneered the soft-focus film effect--who lent her famous face to the cause. But race hatred isn't at the core of Miller's project.

"I really feel like it's a parable of an unwritten American history," he says. "There's a sense that a lot of the issues are still here. We can easily see them at work in the recent election, where they had widespread voter disenfranchisement--most of this is still cycling through the system. I feel it's much more a parable of integrated America than historical America. The violence, the sense of uncertainty about the political process--all that's still going on." Miller sees the paradox of equality as grating against "the actual reality of the 'prison industrial system,' the basic sense of cynicism surrounding class and social hierarchy, all of these things the film was the first to really portray." And, as the first film to depict an American election, "the first film to dig into the texture of how ethnicity became a standardized cliché," for Miller, "Birth of a Nation" seems as relevant now as ever before.

When Miller DJs as Spooky, he sees his work as creating a soundtrack to the space he's working in, whether club or gallery environment, defining his environment through sound--and that soundtrack element's just as vital a part of this performance too. "My whole kick was around the idea of applying blues to the film, thinking of it much more in line with applying DJ culture, to remixing the film in the same way I would remix a track. So I did research on Robert Johnson's "Phonograph Blues"--he did a couple different versions of it--then I transcribed that into electronic music, notated it, made it become kind of electro-acoustic-classical and the rest was my own hip-hop elements. The whole idea of blues as the crossroads music--Robert Johnson was one of the famous folks to say `you've gone to the crossroads,' and to me the Internet is the new crossroads." That sense of democratization informs much of his style and aesthetic, which comes out of a whole way of thinking inspired by concepts regularly associated with Internet technologies: exchange (email, for instance), transformation and issues of how music travels in our culture (think Napster). "We live in the Information Age and this film is a good reflection of that, because it's a film basically about the mythologies of information. The myth of course is that--the film starts out saying that the African American created all these problems and friction in America, which is of course a paradox because all the people in the film are mainly whites in blackface. So I think the film is asking these questions without really answering them."

Taking this notion of Information Age democracy one step further, Miller has made "Rebirth of a Nation" downloadable and remixable on his website, www.djspooky.com. "I want people to feel like the film is just part of the media landscape, that they can remix it the way they remix a lot of other things. It's a way to start people not being so passive about history, moving them toward understanding that we can change things." Miller sees the ability to interfere, to reorganize, to redistribute basic information as rooted in ideas holding together how we think of contemporary culture. As a sign of this, he points to the popular practice among visual artists of using found software in their work. "Again, the idea here is that software has inherited the same aesthetic as what was going on with pop art in a different era. Look at surrealism, which could easily be half the stuff on your website. Or look at the Italian Futurists, at a guy named Luigi Russolo, he wrote a book called `The Art of Noise,' which later became a pop band. I'm sure you know who they are. And so on and so on; the avant-garde of one era becomes the technology of another."

(2004-11-17)

Also by Michael Workman

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