[iDC] Antarctica: An Artist Dialog

[Paul Miller]

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. 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 20th  
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 20th 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 20th 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 21st 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 21st 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 21st 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!
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