[Reader-list] Tonite - Artist Dialog with Peter Halley, Yale University, NY

[Paul Miller]

Hey y'all - I have a show currently up at Robert Miller Gallery - it  
opens on Jan 8, 2009. There will be artist/composer dialogs every  
Thursday of January around my show. The trailer for the project is at:
www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php

Tonite is a dialog with Peter Halley, Chair of Yale University's Art  
Department for Painting. I hope some folks from the list can make it.  
There will be a wide variety of people at the dialog

in peace,
Paul aka Dj Spooky

So far: the dialogs are as follows:
Gallery show opened on Jan 8, 2009


Then: Every Thursday of January: 6-8pm

Sound + Image: Composers in dialog about contemporary art and  
composition
"Meet The Composer" is media sponsor for the events.

Sound + Image

Laura Kuhn - Director of the John Cage Trust Foundation is in dialog  
with me on Jan 10

Peter Halley - Chair of Yale University's Art Department for Painting  
is in dialog with me on Jan 15

Carol Becker - Dean of Columbia University's School of The Arts is in  
dialog with me on Jan 22

Paul Cantalone (Oliver Stone's sound track composer - did the score  
for W), Carter Burwell (soundtrack composer for No Country for Old  
Men), and Ronen Givony (curator, Wordless Music Festival), are in  
dialog with me on Jan 29


Here's the press release for the project:

North/South

Robert Miller Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of  
the work of Paul Miller. In 2008 Miller went to Antarctica to shoot a  
film about the sound of ice, and ended up creating an installation out  
of the journey. For Robert Miller Gallery, Paul Miller recasts the  
epic detritus of the art and other cultural worlds as skillfully  
handled archival video samplings, digital prints, and drawings,  
calling into question the value of appropriation and the status of the  
copy. Finding inspiration in historic documents and films like James  
F. Cook's infamous 1912 film "The Truth about the Pole" (a false  
narrative made by the "explorer" using the North Pole as a film  
studio, Cook tried to portray himself in a documentary he self- 
financed as the true discoverer of the North Pole), and rare images of  
Admiral Byrd's 1939 voyage to the South Pole, Miller explores the  
range of "truth" in modern portrayals of the explorer's path. In  
2007-2008 Miller spent four weeks in Antarctica re-tracing several  
explorers' journeys and with his "North/South" show at Robert Miller  
gallery, he reconstructs a collage of their journals and ephemera in  
multiple contexts. Using materials as diverse as John Cage's 1938  
"Imaginary Landscape #1" as an inspiration (it was the first  
composition written for turntables) Miller looks at how documents and  
archival materials influence perception of history and the search for  
the explorer's goal of defining new frontiers. In "North/South" he  
deftly recontextualizes the rhetorical tropes of music notation and  
graphic design to mine the intersection of public and personal.

A deejay and writer, Miller maps his ongoing relationship with the  
past, present, and future of music, using record collections, musical  
taxonomies, and play-lists as impetus for portraits and cultural  
critiques to blur the lines between how composers create and artists  
design work based on a seamless dialog between "sampling" and  
originality. This exhibition of new work will incorporate digital  
prints, works on paper, and a video installation to define a sonic  
landscape/timeline that begins around the turn of the first millennium  
and projects centuries ahead into the future for concepts such as "A  
Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica." Drawing on a history  
of music's ups and downs in terms of mountains and valleys, water and  
above all, ice, Miller expands on the tradition of landscape  
portraiture, creating a topography of music spanning across every wall  
of the gallery. North/South is comprised of four sections: 1)  
Notations – a contemporary response to John Cage, 2) Appropriation of  
O, a collaboration with artist Ann Hamilton, 3) Rodchenko, Revisited –  
an exploration of Miller's graphic design of prints for a fictional  
revolution in Antarctica, and 4) North/South – a video installation  
juxtaposing Admiral Byrd and James F. Cook's respective voyages to the  
South and North Poles, with historical documents of other famous and  
infamous voyages to Antarctica and the Arctic. Miller translates the  
possibilities of music's futures into graphic terms of an almost  
science-fictional account in images of a revolution in Antarctica. His  
backward and forward glance, though, embraces its own subjective  
account, bringing Miller's own thoughts on history (and its  
representation) to the forefront. His "People's Republic of  
Antarctica" does not attempt to be a definitive narrative on music's  
relationship to revolution, but instead one that exists at the  
interface of his personal vision and that of a shared popular culture.

Miller's video installation is an acoustic portrait of Antarctica's  
relationship to the "Great Game" of national interests in claiming the  
wilderness of the South Pole. Miller's composed score for the video  
materials is based on gamelan shadow theater, and electronic music's  
ability to re-define geography's relationship to "authenticity" –  
natural sounds versus their reconstruction in digital media are motifs  
for the composition that accompanies the installation. While using  
sound within installations has a tradition in contemporary art, Miller  
conflates its use within a fine-art context with other ways in which  
music reaches the public. Miller postulates that you are your own  
archive. His composition "Terra Nova" was written while he was in  
Antarctica for 4 weeks, and it offers an extended trip through  
Miller's sound art palette.

Paul Miller was born in 1970 in New York. In 2004, his exhibition  
Rebirth of a Nation, a remix of D.W. Griffith's infamous "Birth of a  
Nation" was installed as "Path is Prologue" where it premiered at the  
Paula Cooper Gallery, and then traveled as a live multi-media opera to  
over fifty widely acclaimed venues, such as the Herod Atticus Theater  
at the base of the Acropolis and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. His  
works have been performed at locations as diverse as the Tate Modern  
and The Guggenheim and he has had numerous exhibitions in the United  
States and abroad, including solo shows at the Annina Nosei Gallery  
and he has also curated group exhibits at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. In  
addition, Miller has been included in the 1997 and 2002 Whitney  
Biennial, the 2004 Venice Biennial of Architecture, and 2007 Venice  
Biennial's "Africa Pavilion." In 2004 he published a critically  
acclaimed and award winning book "Rhythm Science" about the  
relationship of graphic design and contemporary music, and in 2008, he  
edited an anthology of writings on sound art, digital media, and  
contemporary composition entitled "Sound Unbound" (both, MIT Press),  
featuring Pierre Boulez, Steve Reich, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Brian Eno,  
Moby, Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jonathan Lethem, Daphne Keller (Senior  
Legal Counsel to Google) and many others. In addition to his art  
works, he tours the world constantly as Dj Spooky - a very "in-demand"  
world famous dj. He currently lives and works in New York.

Terra Nova, the composition based on Miller's journey to Antarctica  
will be premiering in NY as a headlining event of Brooklyn Academy of  
Music's Next Wave Festival 2009, and will tour opera houses for the  
next several years.


The Robert Miller Gallery
524 W26th Street
New York New York, 10001

Tel: 1 212 366 4774
Fax: 1 212 366 4454
Email: rmg at robertmillergallery.com

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday Through Saturday, 10am to 6pm