Terra Nova: The Antarctic Suite, cont’d
PHP: So you’re really treating Antarctica as a cultural construction as much as a natural place.
PDM: Oh, absolutely! I mean, it’s a blank spot on the map. It’s a script. It’s an empty narrative. People are going to project all sorts of stuff.
There’s a lot of ironic things about being the Great Explorer, whether you’re Vasco da Gama or Diego Córtez, Robert Peary going for the North or Shackleton in the South. These are people who are looking for things, to see if there’s fortune and fame at the end of the voyage.
So people go to Antarctica not to look for anything but to find themselves, almost. The pun is that you have a metaphor––all humor intended––that people just look at as a blank space.
PHP: It’s kind of the culmination of the Age of Exploration. After everything else, there’s still Antarctica.
PDM: Well, Antarctica is much more of a blank space than Diego Córtez going into Mexico to take the Aztecs’ gold, you know? Both represent mystery and this blank space on the map of your culture. Extreme temperatures, extreme places: those are the common denominators.
But one involved genocide and destruction and murderous exploitation, and the other, Antarctica, represents a kind of continuous blank, because people have kept looking and looking and looking and couldn’t find anything. And that was the point.
PHP: You’ve written “Every sensation that you have comes to you through civilization.” In Antarctica did you ever go “Oh, my God, not a single sensation I’m having right now is coming to me via civilization”?
PDM: Yeah, well, you’d be wearing a really high-tech Goretex™ parka that can breathe in the wind, you know, this kind of mountain climbing gear, very high tech clothing. If you take that off, or if you fall in the water, you die within two minutes.
PHP: Did you fall in? [laughter]
PDM: No, but you’re walking on ice, basically––again, all puns intended. You have to walk carefully, because you could fall through––into a crevasse, like a deep fracture that the ice covers. You could break your leg, or if there’s water, God forbid, you go into hypothermic shock. Your muscles freeze up, and you die within two minutes.
Antarctica’s a huge place. It’s bigger than the continental landmass of North America, and there’s 2,000 people there, total. You know, there’s probably 2,000 people in half of this block.
It was an art project about acoustic portraits and how you set up a sound studio in these remote places to see what kind of music comes out of that.
PHP: So did you have some of the same problems that your Pearys and your Shackletons had with equipment freezing and so forth?
PDM: I came pretty well prepared. I studied what other people have done. There have been a lot of artists going down there, like Pierre Huyghe. He just went down and hung out on a yacht, right? [laughter]
So I went to the interior. Ice fields and stuff. It was a different kind of trip.
PHP: So you’re down there recording ice. If you’re in the middle of an ice field, what sounds is the ice making?
PDM: Well, you’ve got to remember, the ice shelf is always slightly moving. The continent doubles in size every winter. So it makes this really interesting sense of continuous turbulence and dynamic clashes in the ice. You have these kind of creaking, groaning sounds where you realize, “Whoa! This huge land mass could fall apart.”
It’s called calving when the ice does that, but from an urban context we’re all used to this solid surface beneath our feet. I like that. There are a lot of tiny but eerily strange things like that.
My whole motto for the project was “Urban Deprogramming”.
PHP: But are you ever actually “off the grid” anywhere?
PDM: No. You might as well call it the extended city.
You know, a friend of mine had a satellite phone, this huge antenna. But it cost something like five dollars a minute to use, so it depends on how much access to different networks you want.
PHP: So, when are you going to start performing Terra Nova?
PDM: I’m having a series of one-off premiers. One was at the SJ01 Festival in San Jose, which is a heart of Silicon Valley kind of scene. The other one is at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. It’s a big opera festival, and it’s the first time they’ve ever had a DJ project.
We’re going to have it at the ruins of some palace. I like pushing nonconventional, quirky venues, so we’re trying to get the ruins of some duke’s palace or something in Spoleto.
PHP: Does the location then resonate with the medium, just like two tracks might resonate within the mix?
PDM: Yeah. We also got the Greek government to give me the Herod Atticus Theater at the base of the Acropolis, and we had Rebirth of a Nation there. I kind of like the hypermodern mixed with ancient ruins. There’s something timeless about that; we’re so conditioned to think “New! New! New! New!”
But we are pitching the Antarctica thing to IMAX, too.
