Sound Unbound
PHP: I wanted also to talk about Sound Unbound a bit. How did it come about?
PDM: Well, it’s a book project I had been working on for a while. It’s kind of a statement about hybridity, pulling people from really different perspectives into thinking creatively about sound as a dynamic, open system rather than the art world’s closed system about objects and markets.
I pulled people from a lot of different scenes, like Daphne Keller, the legal counsel to Google. She’s a major lawyer, but she’s also a great writer. Brian Eno’s history of bells is really cool.
The eclecticism points to a kind of systemic link between the creative process and sound, and what that means for a creative person in the 21st Century. It’s really about patterns and pattern recognition the same way computers are about algorithms, and algorithms are nothing but patterns, too. Digital technology has created a connection between a lot of the creative media.
PHP: A couple years ago during a STUDIOcrawl you mentioned your disparate audiences. Does having two books published add one more backslash to the “Paul Miller, artist/DJ Spooky, impresario” persona?
PDM: If anything, it goes backwards. I felt like I started out as a writer and artist, and DJ-ing was meant to be an extension of that. I just view it as text, so there’s not a division for me. I really am into the idea of this seamless connection between sound, art and literature. There’s no difference; they’re all about creativity. But there’s a division for the audience.
PHP: We saw you a couple years ago at the AfroPunk Festival. Your slice was very much about the the house DJ putting the video and music out there, making the video jump to the beats––
PDM: It was a party––
PHP: ––and it was impressive! But I looked around the room and thought “Do any of these people realize what Paul’s actually doing here?”
PDM: Probably not, no. [laughter]
I’ve got to be honest; it’s just kids hanging out. But you gotta have the kids to contextualize it. If you don’t have the kids, you lose a lot of the energy that animates the music. I don’t want that, so I’m making a point to keep one foot in that world and one foot in these kind of academic circles.
PHP: Would you like to see those audiences mix more than they do?
PDM: Yeah.
PHP: You mentioned it being about text, but in the last 40 years this notion that everything is text, or information, or data, has become almost comfortable. If all the world is text, then what the heck is text?
PDM: It’s information! And as the 21st Century gets deeper and weirder and more Internet and wireless and iPhone-cellphone-whatever, you’re going to see a lot more information artists, people playing with information as part of the fabric of everyday life, even the idea of nature as a legible text. It’s just about different kinds of literacy, which is why it’s important to push this idea of how digital media can translate.
Like Richard Serra is my next door neighbor. He does Computer Aided Design, and so does Frank Gehry. They’re both using this high-end software to make really interesting, beautiful shapes. But are they digital artists? No. They’re more people who are looking at hybrid form. Richard would probably burst into flames if anybody said he was digital, but… [laughter] You know, it’s just one more tool.
PHP: If there’s anything you mention in your writing as frequently as editing and sampling, it’s architecture and sculpture. Is it just your installation work that you consider 3D, or is it all 3D in some way?
PDM: Hmm. Let me think of a response to that.
Sound is about dimensionality. On the other hand, a composer writing a sixteenth note, or somebody on a computer screen editing a sound wave: those are different interfaces. Like when you’re editing my voice together, you’re going to bounce it to your computer, edit and chop it. Not like someone two centuries ago, who would have struggled to recall it.
I’m just trying to figure out, is memory itself about spatiality? Yeah. You know, there’s that Proust moment where you look at a biscuit or something and it makes you remember a 500 page book. All of that’s mnemonics.
But, you know, the way we relate to the technology we’re almost outsourcing our memory, our speaking or performance. What ends up happening is that people are going to play with it as a sound object. That’s just a natural extension of living in a world of recordings. They take something that’s essentially very tactile, very immersive and make it into a data file.
Today somebody like Kehinde Wiley takes photographs of his subjects, documents them in a three-dimensional way from different camera angles and so on, chooses a composite image, renders that out in Photoshop, and then paints it. Now, is that “real”?
I don’t want to seem like I have all this faith in technology or whatever, but I do think it’s digging up some very interesting things in the rubble of the Modernist project.
