[Reader-list] Fwd: Antarctica: An Artist Dialog

[Iram Ghufran]

Subject:
Antarctica: An Artist Dialog
From:
Paul Miller <anansi5000 at gmail.com>
Date:
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:01:12 -0400



Hello people - this is an interview for an interesting conference coming 
up at Columbia University/Barnard College called "Gender on Ice" coming 
up in November. My film "Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica" and Isaac 
Julian's film "True North" will be featured.


An Interview with Paul D. Miller on his Antarctica film “Terra Nova” by 
Elena Glasberg, ELENA GLASBERG. Adjunct Associate Professor, Princeton 
University

Terra Nova – Sinfonia Antarctica trailer:

http://www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php

Elena Glasberg

Question: When did Antarctica emerge into your world? Do you recall 
images? Was it fiction? Or, learning of historic exploration figures?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

I guess some of my most formative film experiences come from early 
cinema pieces like the two films – Melies ’ s 1902 “ The Conquest of the 
North ” and the “false” history of Frederick A. Cook’s 1912 “The Truth 
About the Pole” – I used to watch old films whenever I could, so I’d 
catch this kind of strange dualism. Like the Lumiere brothers, Cook’s 
film tried to portray itself as a realistic almost documentary kind of 
scenario. I usually prefer the other school of though – Melies started 
out as a magaician who wanted to apply magic technique to film. The two 
films are about the opposite side of the planet from Antarctica, but 
they’re both amazingly, eerily prescient about how discovery and the 
“voyager’s path” would then take on almost surreal proportions. That’s a 
similar motif for my “Terra Nova” and “Manifesto for a People’s Republic 
of Antarctica” projects. They both use found footage, print-design, and 
propaganda to show how exploration at the edge of the world is a prism 
to view how nations look at one another, and how art itself is a highly 
politicized medium. I guess you could say I’m inspired as much by Jules 
Verne as I am by the exploration of the film “90 Degrees South” by 
cinematographer Herbert G. Ponting, who was one of the first people to 
get footage from Antarctica.

Elena Glasberg

Question: Your work engages in and emerges through tropes and modes of 
globalism, the internet specifically. Yet you also dj for live 
audiences. How does Antarctica figure within your view of a global 
audience?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

For me, music isn't music - it's information. So much of my work comes 
from the hard learned truth that collage speaks across many borders, 
cultures, and yes, economic classes: if you want to deal with hip hop 
and then give a lecture at places like Yale or Harvard, you really have 
to be prepared to speak in academic pidgin as much as be able to flow in 
the club scene etc. I never really thought of myself as “separate” from 
the normal art and academic works that I create. My books, art shows, 
and exhibitions are driven by the obsession I have with saying that 
multi-culturalism, market forces, and the basic fabric of “The 
Enlightenment” are interconnected. One of my favorite recent books 
“Capital and Language” by Christian Marazzi - you can look at people 
like him and his concept of new forms of “hoarding” as a way to engage 
some kind of logic of culturally produced “value.” I always am astounded 
at how little the artworld understands the kind of cultural economy that 
dj culture emerges from. Nothing, after Wagner’s concept of 
“gesamkunstwerk” exists in a vacuum: whether our culture is now taken 
from youtube.com videos or material posted online from cell phones by 
soldier’s in Iraq, we exist in a world where “documents” act as a kind 
of testimony. But once something is recorded, it’s basically a file 
waiting to be manipulated. That’s what links the concept of the remix to 
everything going on these days – truth itself is a remix. Anyway, it’s 
all about a new kind of relativism.

Elena Glasberg

Question: What do you think of Vaughan-Williams’ Sinfonia Antartica, as 
music and as an historical artifact of an Antarctic vision?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

Vaughn Williams, it’s well documented, was pre-occupied with the concept 
with the “end of empire” and the end of World War II. I really think 
that’s when the concept of the British Empire and Commonwealth needed to 
be re-examined, and if you look at the Indian liberation project of 
Ghandi and Indian independence in 1947, that kind of stuff must have 
really been foremost on the mind of the generation of composers that 
needed to give the British something to think about after the war as a 
way of looking forward to reconstruction. What had the war been about 
except imperial ambition! By making Robert Scott, someone who had died 
in service to the Empire, the film “Scott of the Antarctic” really set 
the tone for how the twilight of the British Empire needed to look for 
new heroes. Let’s not forget that the first composition to really engage 
Antarctica started as a soundtrack for Vaughn'’s score to the film. I 
enjoy playing with the concept of music as a mirror we hold up to 
society – the Vaughn soundtrack, like the original music composed by 
Joseph Carl Breil for D.W. Griffith’s film “Birth of a Nation” - was a 
pastiche of themes and motifs that would speak to a film audience. I 
wanted to update the same concept with turntables and digital media. I 
really don’t think of music, film, and art as separate. There is a 
seamless connection – it’s the creative mind at work.

Elena Glasberg

Question: I’m interested that you actually went to a part of the 
Antarctic – I’m assuming the peninsula, by boat from South America. How 
did your conception of Antarctica as a place interact with your embodied 
presence? What was the most surprising aspect of being in Antarctica?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

I went to several islands, and ice fields that were near the Antarctic 
peninsula but a little further down on the continent. I’ll be going back 
in a while to check out more of the interior. We chartered a Russian ice 
breaker called “The Academic Ioffe” and the next time I go, I’m going to 
try and get to the Lake Vostok base. The most surprising thing about 
Antarctica was the stench of penguin shit. You can smell them a mile or 
so out in the water!!! I’m always “embodied” (I always tend to mix that 
up with “embedded” these days anyway), so there’s no conflicted sense of 
spatial issues that seems to haunt a lot of the discourse about what 
physical performance is all about in a digital context. I live and 
remember it all. The idea of the “journey” if you look at Melies film 
“The Conquest of the North” from 1912, is still with us. It’s now just 
“hyper-realism.”

Elena Glasberg

Question: Do you think people belong in Antarctica?

Paul D. Miller

Response: No

Elena Glasberg

Question: Why do people need to /hear/ Antarctica? How does this mode 
distinguish itself from seeing Antarctica, which has been the 
overwhelming mode since the turn of the last century and the accident of 
near simultaneous advent of film photography and embodied access to the 
inner continent? How do you see your mixed modes of approach – 
embodiment and digitized representation - in the context of the history 
of representing the (arguably) most mediated place on earth?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

Everything is I do is about paradox. It makes life fun. I think that 
people need to “HEAR” Antarctica because it is at the edge of the world. 
The idea of “mixed modes of approach” is a good term (of course, the 
dominant theme in dj culture is “the mix” so there’s some salient 
linkage there … ). The technical terms “heterodoxy” or “heterogeneity” 
both find a solid home in me and my work. I celebrate that kind of 
thing. One day, the software we use and the life we live will blur. 
It'’s kind of already happened. But that’s why I go to places like 
Antarctica. NY is probably one of the most mediated places on earth. If 
I have a conversation at a café, someone will put it on a blog. If I 
walk down the street, someone puts photos of it on flickr. It’s 
irritating, but hey… it’s the way we live now. Antarctica represents a 
place mediated by science – it’s literally almost another world. Some of 
my favorite science fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson’s 
“Antarctica” or Crawford Kilian’s “IceQuake” who deal with Antarctica 
come up with some of the same themes: science, art and the weirdly 
un-worldliness of the ice terrain. I think of that kind of stuff as an 
update of the speculative visions of Verne that inspired Melies with his 
earlier films. My film “Terra Nova” and my gallery show “Manifesto for a 
People’s Republic of Antarctica” are in the same tradition. Music from 
the edge of the physical environment and music from the core of the 
urban landscape. Watch them collide in paradox.

Elena Glasberg

Question: You work among a wide variety of audiences, purposefully and 
joyously erupting into places not usually associated (variously) with dj 
culture, beats, aural sophistication, and academic-style 
intellectualization. Where do you place Antarctica within your work and 
audience.

Paul D. Miller

Response:

I have a degree of comfort with new places that makes life in this hyper 
turblulent and digitally abstract contemporary life. Life is hybrid and 
always has been. It’s just that digital media is making us realize that 
it’s not about the “end of Western culture” because of multi-culturalism 
etc It’s actually giving Western culture a place in whatever else has 
been going on. Which is healthy… I just roll with it all. Edward Said’s 
critique of Western classical music as a kind of involuted “samizdat” 
(as above, so below…), rings true for my work. I really think that the 
distinctions that defined most of the 20 ^th century are almost gone. 
Technology has moved far more quickly to transform our social structures 
than anyone could have anticipated. Dj culture accepts this and 
celebrates this kind of phenomenon precisely because it’s not linked to 
the production of objects – it’s obsessed with continuous 
transformation, and that’s where I live. In total flux.

Elena Glasberg

Question: You are intrigued by Antarctica’s geopolitical exception – its 
lack of indigenous and its never-nationalized status now under the 1959 
Antarctic Treaty System. I see this reflected in your playful echo of 
the title of a 1981 novel by John Calvin Bachelor, /The People’s 
Republic of Antarctica/ , in your marvelous poster series. How do you 
see Antarctica -- as an exception to global politics? A demonstration of 
alternative possibilities to history? An opportunity for fantasy? What 
vision of propaganda and history inspired the poster series?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

If you look at the 20 ^th century advertising, as Sigmund Freud’s nephew 
Edward Bernays, who coined the term “public relations,” was the hidden 
architecture holding both capitalism and communism together. Everyone 
had to get their message out! Whether it was Stalin who said that 
“engineers are poets of the soul” or Chairman Mao, who put teachers in 
chains and paraded them as false prophets, the kind of “stay on message” 
type ethos dominated the media discourse of every nation. With my 
“Manifesto for a People’s Republic of Antarctica” print design projects 
and my film projects – I simply ask the question: what if the nation 
state went away? What centrifuge would we all then call home? What would 
be the point of looking at the state as a kind of generative 
architecture? Would who be commissioning the designs, who would be 
fostering the arts? The answer: corporations. I use the ironic motif of 
stuff like the British East India company or some of the ways that we 
have corporate sponsorship of exploration/high endurance sports etc as 
examples. If you look at Rodchenko’s designs or Malevich’s early 
minimalism, you can see an echo of that in my work – the revolution for 
the U.S. after the fall of the Berlin Wall was untrammeled capitalism. 
Look around and see what it’s done for us! The only competing ideology 
at this point is radical Islam. I’m not so sure that people would like 
to embrace Sharia economics, but if they look at the Middle East, 
there’s lots of solid banking going on (unlike Wall street this week). I 
guess you could say that my work is kind of an aesthetic futures market 
where any sound can be you. That’s what sampling is about. The Terra 
Nova and Manifesto for a People’s Republic of Antarctica projects are 
mirrors held up to a world that is melting. I don’t know about you, but 
I think it’s a pretty strange mirror to see oneself in. I read John 
Calvin Bathelor’s book and enjoyed it, but aside from “sampling” the 
title (I do this a lot!), there’s not much of a connection – except that 
his book is a meditation on the end of norms of governance.

Elena Glasberg

Question:

How are you creating the sounds of Antarctica? What is the technical 
process and how does it reflect Antarctic representation, its 
challenges, and its history?

Paul D. Miller

Response: My gallery installation at Robert Miller Gallery and Irvine 
Fine Arts is loosely based on the “false” story of Frederick A. Cook – 
who went North. “The Truth about the Pole” (1912) was a self-promotional 
docudrama in which producer Frederick A. Cook sought to have himself 
treated as a heroic adventurer who discovered the North Pole, a claim 
he'd been making since 1909. No director wanted credit for making it. 
Cook plays the starring role as himself. There is at least one appealing 
set that attempts to be naturalistic, showing a frozen ship in the 
distant background. Mostly it all looks pretty hooky. It's interesting 
how little one needs for a quick jaunt to the Pole, a log-book, sled, & 
American flag being the whole of it. All one requires to recover from 
such an easy stroll is a nice wooden hut & one sip of coffee from a tin 
cup. A silent film villain, Harry Whitney, is the evil scoundrel who 
started the rumor that Cook's former claim to have climbed Mt McKinley 
was a fabrication. This was (according to the revisions proposed by his 
film) Whitney's newest salvo in a campaign to make Cook's polar 
expedition appear to have been a hoax. I think it’s hilarious – I 
repurpose this kind of thing, and flip it into Southern perspective. Who 
owns the ice? Who owns the memory of the ice? My composition for the 
installation at the galleries is based on gamelan music from the idea of 
“shadow theater” mixed with string arrangements taken from my score to 
Terra Nova. Debussy after all, was inspired by gamelan, and I guess you 
could say ambient electronic music is about as “impressionist” 
composition as you can get. I like the idea of ambiguity. It keeps you 
on your feet, makes you think about paradox and the digital world of 
relativity we live in today. When I went to Antarctica I wanted to have 
a place where there was essentially a fresh perspective and where I 
really needed to think about how I would interact with the environment 
in a way that would free up some of the issues that drive normal hip 
hop. The sounds in my projects come from nature – wind, water, the noise 
of feet walking on ice… my project takes those sounds and uses them as 
an acoustic palette. I mixed and remixed the material to the point that 
bass lines come from wind and water movement, and the sound of human 
breath can be a motif made into some kind of strange pattern. The score 
for “Terra Nova” was written in a much more conventional way, but that’s 
why I like to say I’m into paradox. You could almost say that the score 
for Terra Nova is neo-Baroque, just on the edge of when everyone thought 
that the Age of Reason had dealt a death blow to superstition in Europe. 
Try telling that to Sarah Palin! I guess you could say that my project 
is about the “sound of science.”

Elena Glasberg

Question: I’m struck by the influence of Gore’s documentary /An 
Inconvenient Truth/ on subsequent representation of the Antarctic. I’m 
thinking in particular of all the computer graphic simulations of 
melting ice sheets in a pristine and remote Antarctic and the resultant 
rises in sea levels of very well known urban locations. Do you see your 
work in such a context of politicized – or catastrophic - simulation?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

I’m a big Paul Virilio fan…. Let’s call Terra Nova in terms of theory 
speak (it’s just a different pidgin language after all): trajectories of 
the catastrophic, or pure war. Antarctica isn’t a place: it’s a 
location. It’s kind of like saying Buddhism isn’t a religion: it’s a 
philosophy. Everyone knows that, but they still get it wrong. I always 
try to get people to think about conceptual frames of reference: context 
is important in my work, and so is content. How do you establish an 
uneasy tension between context and content when everything can be 
remixed and changed, and there’s no final “version” of anything? In my 
film “Terra Nova” that kind of graphic design imprint is crucial to how 
the story is told. If you look at the old Terra Nova expedition of 
Robert Scott, you can only think: wouldn’t it have been great if they 
had satellite footage to tell them they weren’t that deep into the ice, 
and to compare some different routes to get out of the drift their ship 
was caught in. Stuff like Apsley Cherry Garrad’s infamous “The Worst 
Journey in The World” where he says “Polar exploration is at once the 
cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been 
devised,” is one of the most succinct ways one could put this simple 
observation. Melting ice sheets look cool, but then again, so do solar 
flares on the surface of the sun. They’re both harmful… but hey.. art 
makes things look cool.

Elena Glasberg

Question: Your film will be debuting at the democratic convention in 
August. How exciting. Obama will presumably see it. What would you like 
him to see, to respond to, and to promote in his election platform (and 
possible administration)?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

I really think it’s time to say goodbye to the 20 ^th century. So yes, 
the Obama convention with Dialog City as the focal point for the 
contemporary art scene was a breath of fresh air for me. I really liked 
premiering my film at the Denver Opera House. The Colorado art scene is 
a lot more progressive than NY! I think Obama will probably be one of 
the greenest presidents since Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White 
House. The Republicans went crazy, but in hindsight, it was really 
really really cool. I like stuff like that – that’s why I premiered 
Terra Nova at the Democrats convention.I think of Terra Nova as a 
reflection site – a location for the politics of perception that we use 
to look at the environment.

Elena Glasberg

Question: Antarctica and in particular the South Pole have been fantasy 
objects for US and European imperialism since the early 1900s. Authors 
populated the unknown south with wishful fantasies of lost races, arable 
lands, and mineral wealth. Postcolonial nations such as Argentina, 
Chile, and even Malaysia have fought and argued to be included among the 
arbiters of Antarctica’s possible riches. How do you negotiate 
nationalism and the history of imperialism in your own approach to the 
territory?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

You really have to think about Antarctica as a “possible terrain” – it’s 
a surface we project on, but it doesn’t reflect us back. I always think 
of the phrase Bruce Sterling says: the suicide bomber is the poor mans 
cruise missile. There’s always going to be conflict over resources as 
long as people think everything is completely limited. The weird thing 
about the 21 ^st century is that we have perspective. That’s something 
the warring empires of the past didn’t. We have history, comparative 
science, and above all, a sense of urgency with regard to global 
warming. And guess what – we still can’t get it together. Some of the 
best recent films dealing with Antarctica: Werner Herzog’s “Encounters 
at The End of The World” or the anti-whaling film “At the Edge of the 
World” both have this kind of “rebel/misfit scientist” take on the 
expatriate community that lives in Antarctica. The cracks in the mirror 
are where some of the best images are to be found. Antarctica, for me, 
is just a really big crack in the way we look at the land claims of the 
“great nations” – I really think that my film project is a cinema-scape 
in the same tradition of Nam Jun Paik, John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape” 
or Edgar Varese and Scriabin’s visual essays turned into sound. 
Imperialism is such a concrete process: take the land, brainwash the 
natives, make the people back home think it’s all being done in their 
name… The problem with the 21 ^st century for that kind of schemata is 
that no one really believes it any more. It’s just one fiction of many. 
I tend to think that that’s a good thing. It’s time for a fresh 
kaleidoscope! We need more paradox than we can possibly know right now. 
And Antarctica is the place to manifest that kind of paradox. After all, 
it’s the end of the world. I want us to look over the edge…

Elena Glasberg

Question:

The majority of people on earth will never come near Antarctica. How do 
you want them to think of their relation to this remote and highly 
mediated territory? Do you feel that you’re operating with a (excuse the 
phrase) blank screen, or do preconceptions of the region cloud 
collective action?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

How do people hear Antarctica? It’s a question that lingers over this 
interview. Unmoored, unleashed, free floating - sampling derives it's 
sense of free cut and paste aesthetics from the interplay of the kind of 
"rip, mix, and burn" scenario of the 21st century's information economy. 
But there are so many cultural resonances that kick in when we think 
about "appropriation art." I love to throw in allusions and word play – 
it mirrors what I do with sound, so excuse the aside: In 1964 Ralph 
Ellison, one of my favorite writers, read a statement at the Library Of 
Congress about the possibility of an artform made of fragments. The 
lecture was called "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" and basically it was a 
manifesto about a series of poems and music that was made into a "mix" 
of music that influenced him. It was kind of a "sonic memorial" made of 
fragments from artists and composers as diverse as Duke Ellington, Louis 
Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson - but the selection was meant 
to be a literary scenario that evoked music as a kind of text.

Of the jazz legends he invoked in his discussion, he simply wrote that 
"the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the desire to 
express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition... Life 
could be harsh, loud and wrong if it wished, but they lived it fully, 
and when they expressed their attitude toward the world it was with a 
fluid style that reduced the chaos of living to form." As an artist, 
writer, and musician, this kind of hybridity is something that drives my 
work. I'm inspired by the destruction of old, boring, ways of thinking 
and feeling, by the casting into the flames of obsolence all the stupid 
old categories that people use to hold the world back from the interplay 
of uncontrolled "mixing." Yeah, I say - we need to mix and remix 
everything. There is no final version of anything once it's digital. Is 
this a mirror we can hold up to society in the era of information 
overload? Dj mixes, freeware, open source media... yeah - they say it is 
possible. Antarctica is a realm of possibility because put simply, very 
few people are aware of its story. That in itself is a rare and elusive 
quality that the beginning of the 21 ^st century has brought front and 
center into modern perspective: there’s strength in invisibility. You 
have to think of the landscape and the way artists interact with it. 
John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape” from 1939 was composed of records 
playing frequencies. But if you fast forward to his composition “In a 
Landscape” from 1948, you can easily see early taste for percussion 
instruments and "found sounds," as well as his interest in embedded, 
recursive rhythmic structures, while the last two of the series, 
composed in 1951 and 1952, exhibit the influences of Cage's experiments 
with various kinds of pre-compositional chance operations. I think that 
is what resonates with Antarctica for me: the space to be sonically 
free. After all: it’s the only place on Earth with no government. What’s 
the soundtrack to that?

Elena Glasberg

Question:

Most reporting on Antarctica these days tends toward the catastrophic: 
ice melting, penguins starving, and now oil prices so high that 
scientific research programs themselves are financially threatened with 
extinction. What’s your main message amid this noise? And what if, 
anything, do you think is the greatest threat to Antarctica directly? To 
the globe more generally?

Paul D. Miller

Response:

See above!