Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Spooky thoughts after Rhythm Science

I am profoundly interested in digital landscapes that caress our senses. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid is a fictional character created as an artistic outlet for the artist Paul D. Miller. Paul describes his journey through self discovery and artistic creation for the public. The DJ Spooky persona was an evolving platform for his "conceptual art project" which developed into this "social sculpture, coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity" This platform allowed him to use the over saturated youth culture as a subject for his music. He became a sound archivist as well as archiving text and images to use is his art as well.


Paul explains how the controversy of mixing and sampling can be just as unique as the original. How "the best Dj's are griots, and whether their stories are conscious or unconscious, narratives are implicit in he sampling idea." These stories are relevant, fresh and they convey "psychological collage space" which is unique to the art scene. All of these samples can be taken in context or out of it, they can all collage to create a new understanding and a new contextual space that is not limited to the old associations of the original material.


Today with technology artist are able to create, out of samples and images that have previously been a part of another artistic platform. But technology has given us the ability to mix and create other frequencies of artistic expression that is quite controversial. Paul likes to create in this hyper-fluid environment of information culture, this is what he calls "cybernetic jazz." I am interested in this remixing of images and sounds to create different artistic expressions, stories and emotions. I am interested in the live performance and remixing the social medial structure.
Paul really made me think about language and communication through technology. Paul explains " Saying that people are literate means that they have read widely enough to reference texts, to put them to a conceptual framework. They are capable of creating an overview." This basically says that if you are consuming art and music then eventually when you have consumed enough you may then use some of that knowledge to create your own art and music. Monkey see monkey do.