[Music]
DJ SPOOKY: If somebody were to ask me why it's important to include a kind of a very
serious, very rigorous discussion between music and art, I would say they're each reflections
of this idea that creativity knows no limits.
[Music]
So for my residency at the Met Museum, I want to look at a dialogue between tools and what
y'know what someone might make as a tool, like an iPad app versus a painting.
Y'know, let's draw a paradox there.
When you talk about sampling, when you talk about collage, when you talk about people's
record collections, I wanted to look at the Met museum as a kind of a huge archive.
A huge record collection and to kind of think about the ways that we could engage it and
the ways that we could actually think of history itself.
Because every record is a history.
How we y'know look at that as a provocation—creativity.
So we're calling it Reframing the Museum because the museum—to me the most classic thing
when you go into an old school museum is the frame of the painting.
It's not a about the experience of the museum as a social thing, but about the way you move
through the space.
So a lot of museums are kind of mausoleums.
Like they're dead spaces.
You move through an exhibition.
You might have gone with your mom to the Met or something and there's such a classic New
York experience of the Met as that kind of social transition space.
Like you move through.
There's a kind of procession.
Now, with digital media, I wanted to try and think about looking at the Met from the view
point of the abstraction of the architecture for example and the way that conditions your
experience or the role of the paintings and the way that they're sequenced about history.
There's gonna be five projects at the Met museum.
One is a remix and a re-score of a very film from East Asia called Madame Freedom.
It's the first film made after the Korean civil war and I'm really interested in art
and geopolitics, by the way.
I think that's what's fascinating about this film, Madame Freedom, is that it looks at
when women began to have more power in a Korean context.
We thought that that would be a nice way to show the transformation of Asia under the
impact of technology and other things.
It's considered a classic of Asian cinema.
The other projects, there's five total.
One is called of Water and Ice.
I went to the Arctic circle near the North Pole and did a whole project there.
That project's gonna be a concert and again kind of an abstract installation at the Met.
There's other projects between.
One is with the Civil War where I worked with the estate of again DW Griffith.
He left his estate to Harvard and to MoMA—a long story.
But I remixed the film, so what we're going to do is an update on that.
Looking at the Civil War in the context of red state, blue state.
I'm very blue state and I'm very intrigued by how the history of racial politics has
influenced a lot of elections and of course Obama vs. the Republicans and I rather remix
the entire context of how think about the whole thing.
The final one is going to be kind of a listening party where I remix the museum using wifi
networks and iPads, Google Android tablets, stuff like that so that everyone who comes
in the museum with a smartphone or a tablet will be able to interact with the objects
in the museum in a way that triggers music.
It's kind of an ambitious take.
We'll see what happens.
It's just an experiment.
That's why we're calling it an artist in residency rather than an installation or an exhibition.
Residency implies living, being, exploring, checking it out, and I think that for the
21st century, this is something new.
Nobody's done it before, so we'll see.
A lot of it is going to be about research and a lot of it is going to be about me hanging
out at the Met.
I mean, a lot of the articles that are saying DJ Spooky haunts the Met, which is kind of
fun.
Again, that's Spooky.
Right?
It reminds me of the ghost of Christmas past and y'know Marley is the main character that
comes back and the guy gets taken—y'know the future of Christmas and the past Christmas
and everything.
I kind of feel like that at the Met right now.
It's like y'know—it's very non-linear.
I'll leave it at that.
[Music]
As we move further into the 21st century, people are always talking about decline of
resources, storms.
It's a very for the lack of a better word, malthusian kind of situation where population
increase, weather instability, decline of our superpower status or something—it's
very existential.
But people, if they can imagine something different, you'd be shocked at what they can
do.
A century ago, we weren't flying.
Now we're flying every day, everywhere, all the time.
A century ago, we weren't on the moon.
We'll see.
We have a robot on Mars now sending Twitter feeds and high resolution photographs and
it has it's own Twitter account, y'know I mean.
There's a lot that we can say that can change.
People can imagine something.
Climate change seems to be an inevitable and heavy process, but I bet you that if we were
to imagine and try to work on some of the issues, I have faith in humanity and I think
that we can really change and do a lot of stuff.
These are very cynical times, so it's important to sort of keep that in mind.
It's not permanent and if people can imagine something different, just the ability and
the actual act of imagining something different—saying another world is possible—that alone is
the beginning of a whole process.
I mean, I can point out so many other examples, so I use my art projects to look at not only
a subtle nuance between how people think of history, but to say that this is where sampling
says all sorts of permutations are possible.
What happens if I mix y'know George Clinton parliament funkadelic with horns from Duke
Ellington with a beat from the Rolling Stones.
You combine it up and you've got Wu Tang Clan.
Y'know, who would have guessed?
So y'know that kind of collage is what I celebrate.
Yo, bada boom, bada bing, what's up!
This is Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, you are watching THNKR.