“My residency will be a fun festival of ideas – from the South Pacific to Asia, from the Civil War to 3D photography, from Antarctica to environmental activism, I want to show that music and art are always in dialogue.”
-Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
The Met Reframed is made possible by Marianna Sackler.
The Met Reframed, an unprecedented Metropolitan Museum artist residency, breaks new ground as a collaboration between artist and institution. The Met’s Limor Tomer, General Manager of Concerts & Lectures, conceived this year-long association as an opportunity to engage the curiosity and talents of the composer, multimedia artist, and writer, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid with the extensive artistic and human resources of the Museum to create both new work and dialogues between artists, scholars, curators, and museum visitors.
When speaking at the press conference announcing the first season of Met Museum Presents, the Museum’s newly renamed series of performances and talks of which The Met Reframed is a centerpiece, Paul Miller put it this way: “The role of the museum as preserving history vs. the idea of the artist as someone who interrogates history is going to be one of the themes for the residency. We’ll be playing with this idea of playfulness in its own right, and above all thinking about applying this notion of musicality to the physical space of the museum...reframing the idea of what a museum does to art.”
From October 2012 through June 2013, Paul Miller will engage with a wide variety of audiences at the Met. In addition to headlining five major performances, he will host events for audiences including New York City public school teachers, artists, Met Museum curators and educators, and the general public. Among the performance events are a newly commissioned work inspired by and incorporating images from the upcoming exhibition Photography and the American Civil War; a concert inspired by Oceania’s musical legacy; a performance of DJ Spooky’s original re-score to the Korean film Madame Freedom with a film screening; and a participatory concert using DJ Spooky’s iPhone/iPad app.
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid is a composer, multimedia artist, writer, and DJ. His recorded output includes remixes of music ranging from Wu-Tang Clan, Metallica, and Bob Marley to classical/new music legends Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet, and he has DJ’ed major festivals including Bonnaroo and Power to the Peaceful. His work as a media artist has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennial, and Miami/Art Basel; and his first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, was released by MIT Press in 2004, followed by Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media (MIT Press, 2008).
"For me, it's such an honor to work with the Met from the viewpoint of sampling,” continues Paul Miller. “I want to make a vibrant reflection of this incredible collection of materials from all over the world. My residency will be a fun festival of ideas. From the South Pacific to Asia, from the Civil War to 3D photography, from Antarctica to environmental activism, I want to show that music and art are always in dialogue."
“Through engagement with our collection, living artists can animate gallery spaces, shed new light on the collection, and poetically transfer the power of artwork poetically to visitors,” said Limor Tomer. “Paul Miller is an omnivorous and articulate artist who connects deeply and emotionally with diverse audiences and can engage with many different types of communities. In many ways he is the ideal performer to inaugurate this program: his capacity for experimentation is very high, and his collaborative spirit supports collective ‘open source’ program design.”
Met Museum Presents, the Metropolitan Museum’s series of performances and talks, offers interpretations of and reflections on the Museum’s collection, special exhibitions, and tradition through the work of some of today’s most celebrated composers and performing artists.
Tickets to the events are available at www.metmuseum.org/tickets or by calling 212-570-3949.
In chronological order, following is the schedule of events for
The Met Reframed: DJ Spooky in Residence 2012-13:
Conversation
Met Salon Series – “Culture in Transition: Madame Freedom and Modern Korea” with Paul Miller and Soyoung Lee
Wednesday, October 24, 2012, at 6:00 p.m. in the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall
Madame Freedom (1956), the first film made in Korea after the Korean War, inaugurated a style that defined Korean soap operas. Using historical and contemporary images from Korean cinema, Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, and Soyoung Lee, Associate Curator in the Met’s Asian Art Department, explore graphic design, cultural hybridity, and the fluorescence that occurs when cultures collide. (Madame Freedom October 26 screening/performance).
Tickets: $30
Performance
Madame Freedom – Film screening with live performance of an original score
Friday, October 26, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
In 2007, Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, was commissioned by Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea, and the Korean American Film Festival in New York to re-score this classic 1956 film. As he explains, “In the 1950s, Korea went through a drastic modernization process. After the Korean War ended, South Korea was firmly embedded in a Western cultural sphere, families were put into radically unexpected contexts, and the rise of independent women changed the face of society. The film was viewed as a metaphor of the harmful westernization of all traditions in postwar Korea....”
Miller’s score for string quartet evokes jazz nightclubs of the 21st century, and his use of electronic music enhances the dynamic tensions in the story and foregrounds the visual rhythm of the film’s editing. www.djspooky.com/art/film_madame_freedom.php
In a related event on October 24, 2012, at 6:00 p.m., Miller will talk with Soyoung Lee, Associate Curator in the Met’s Asian Art Department, about his score for the film.
Tickets: $30
Performance
The Nauru Elegies – A live performance/multimedia event
Friday, January 18, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky: “The Nauru Elegies is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble, projected high-definition video footage, digital animation, and live internet feed of GPS coordinates of specific aspects of the island and its physical and financial infrastructure. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities, including research in New York City and documentation in Nauru. The Elegies are a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.
“The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It was, by consensus of several ‘Great Powers,’ used as a raw resource until there was literally nothing left. Nauru has been mined throughout the last two centuries for its phosphate deposits, which occupied 90% of the island. A small territory with no [other] exploitable resources, Nauru in the 1990s turned to off-shore financing and the creation of ‘virtual banks’ as a way of earning sorely needed foreign currency. The Nauru Elegies posits that Nauru reflects many of the issues facing our contemporary information economy.
“The music component of The Nauru Elegies reflects colonial and postcolonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, while the literary and multimedia component of the project spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation.” www.djspooky.com/nauruelegies/
Tickets: $30
Gallery Tour
Public Gallery Tour: DJ Spooky in the Galleries for Oceanic Art
Saturday, January 19, 2013, at 4:00 p.m.
This free gallery tour gives an unprecedented opportunity to look at the Oceanic galleries with an artist’s gaze. Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, shares what draws him to the South Pacific and what about that area of the world inspired his new project, The Nuaru Elegies (performance, January 18). While ticketed in advance, the program is free with Museum admission but limited to 90 participants.
Tickets: Free with Museum admission, reservation required
Conversation
“In/Visible: The economy, environment, and culture of the island nation”
A Companion Conversation to DJ Spooky's The Nauru Elegies
Wednesday, January 23, 2013, at 6:00 p.m. in Bonnie J. Sacerdote Hall
In this companion conversation to his evocative multimedia piece The Nauru Elegies (January 18), Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is joined in dialogue by panelists including Lisa Sachs from the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, as they revisit the cautionary tale of the South Pacific island of Nauru, an example of how a fragile economy built on extraction of finite natural resources and mismanaged off-shore banking profits can so easily crumble under bad decision-making. “The discussion will journey through the unseen networks of the global economy,” says Lisa Sachs, “and the eruptions that ensue when greed and hyper-consumerism go unchecked.”
Tickets: $30
Performance
Of Water and Ice – A Concert of Compositions Based on Water and Arctic Rhythms –
World Premiere of a Metropolitan Museum Commission
Saturday, March 23, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Of Water and Ice is a composition for string quartet and video that evolved from the large-scale multimedia work Sinfonia Antarctica by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. Of Water and Ice is a music/video exploration of the composition of ice and water, and our relationship to the vanishing environment of the arctic poles.
Tickets: $30
Conversation
Sunday at the Met: “Art and the Environment”
Sunday, March 24, 2013, at 2:00 p.m., in Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Join Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, as he shares his experiences from the North and South Poles in a conversation with Museum curators and visual artists about art and the environment as reflected in American culture. Presented in conjunction with the performance of Of Water and Ice the day before (March 23).
This program is free with Museum admission and offers a general adult audience the opportunity to learn about the permanent collection through discussions and presentations. Reservations and tickets are not required.
Tickets: Free with Museum admission
Performance
World Premiere of New Work Relating to Photography and the American Civil War exhibition, a Metropolitan Museum Commission
Friday, May 10, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. in Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Working in tandem with Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, creates a music-video piece for string ensemble with live-mixed electronic music and video, using images from the exhibition Photography and the American Civil War, on view April 2–September 2, 2013. This work was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tickets: $30
Performance
Audience Participation Event Using DJ Spooky’s iPhone/iPad App
Friday, June 21, 2013, at 9:30 p.m. in the Great Hall
Paul Miller invites the audience to bring their iPhones and iPads and collectively mix a soundtrack for a listening party, using his iPhone/iPad app, in the Museum’s Great Hall. This app already has been downloaded by more than 250,000 users.
Tickets: $30
In addition, Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, will host two private, invitation-only events for specific groups:
Private workshop (Please note that participation in this event is by invitation only)
A workshop with DJ Spooky and K-12 educators focusing on his working methods and 21st century learning skills.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
A discussion led by Paul Miller on the ways he draws upon other fields, such as science and math, as an inspiration for his music as well as an exploration of works in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, such as Heart of the Andes, which reflect interdisciplinary investigations.
Private workshop (Please note that participation in this event is by invitation only)
Artist Study Day: “Sampling the Rare/Appropriation”
Monday, May 13, 2013
A selection of artists will join Paul Miller and Met curators to examine historical works in the collections and discuss the practices of sampling and remixing, and their relationship to artistic intention, in their work. The Museum will invite artists who work in a variety of disciplines, are interested in the interplay between cultural history and contemporary practices, and actively use sampling (especially sampling from a wide range of cultural traditions) in their work.
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. His written work has appeared in the Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, and The Wire, among other publications. Miller's work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; Venice Biennale for Architecture (2000); Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; and many other museums and galleries. His work New York Is Now has been exhibited in the Africa Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007, and at Art Basel Miami in 2007. Miller's first collection of essays, entitled Rhythm Science, was published by MIT Press in 2004. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media (2008), is a best-selling title for MIT Press.
Miller's deep interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compilations, remixes, and collections of material from the vaults of the legendary Jamaican label Trojan Records. Other releases include Optometry (2002), a jazz project featuring some of the best players in the downtown NYC jazz scene, and Dubtometry (2003) featuring Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor. Another of Miller's collaborations, Drums of Death, features Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D of Public Enemy among others. He also produced material on Yoko Ono's recent album Yes, I'm a Witch.
DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation was commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Weiner Festwochen, and the Festival d'Automne a Paris. It was the artist's first large-scale multimedia performance piece, and has been performed in venues around the world, from the Sydney Festival to the Herod Atticus Amphitheater, more than 50 times. The DVD version of Rebirth of a Nation was released by Anchor Bay Films/Starz Media in2008.
DJ Spooky's multimedia performance piece Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica was commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival; Hopkins Center/Dartmouth College; UCSB Arts & Lectures; Melbourne International Arts Festival; and the Festival dei 2 Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. With video projections and a score composed by DJ Spooky, performed by a piano quartet, Terra Nova: Sinfornia Antarctica is a portrait of a rapidly transforming continent.
In August 2009, DJ Spooky visited the Republic of Nauru in the Micronesian South Pacific to do research and gather material for The Nauru Elegies, a collaboration with artist/architect Annie Kwon, first presented at Experimenta in Melbourne, Australia, in February 2010. In January 2010 Miller was commissioned by German radio to write the composition Terra Nullius.
In 2011, Miller released a graphic design project exploring the impact of climate change on Antarctica through the prism of digital media and contemporary music compositions that explored the idea of "acoustic portraits" of Antarctica entitled The Book of Ice (Thames and Hudson/Mark Batty Publisher). The Book of Ice includes an introduction by best-selling author and quantum physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe. The Book of Ice is a multimedia installation, a music composition for string quartet, and a book, and it has been included in the 2011 Gwangju Biennial by Korean architect Seung H-Sang and Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
Miller is currently a contributing editor to C-Theory and the arts editor of Origin magazine, which focuses on the intersection of art, yoga, and new ideas. He continues his globe-trottingb series of live events; playing at festivals from France to Japan to Mexico City; performing solo, with chamber groups, and with orchestras; and giving talks at prominent universities and conferences. He has most recently featured at The Economist “Year in 2012” conference, and for Syfy’s “Let’s Imagine Greater” Igniter web series.
www.djspooky.com
“DJ Spooky cannot be called just a DJ. He is a very accomplished composer. But these days, DJ's are the ones who are bringing fresh sounds to the music world. In fact, they are creating a new spatial music. They are the space transformers of the universe."
-Yoko Ono in Origin Magazine
“Talk to 35-year-old New Yorker Paul D Miller for too long and you start to feel like a dimwit. This man is as brainy as a Mensa meeting, sharp as Zorro's sword, funny as Falstaff. He is Einstein with a better haircut, a streetwise black Tolstoy, a revved-up renaissance man for the digital age, obsessed with art, information and digital technology.”
-Sunday Star Times, Auckland, NZ
“Arguably no one is more responsible for propagating and embodying the idea of the deejay as ‘artist’ than DJ Spooky, whose ambitious, elaborate, often hypnotic soundscapes have been notable as much for their eclectic imagination as for their post-modern intellectualism.”
-Chicago Tribune
* For tickets, visit www.metmuseum.org/tickets or call 212-570-3949.
* Tickets are also available at the Great Hall Box Office, which is open Tuesday-Saturday 10-4:30 and Sunday noon-5:00.
* Tickets include admission to the Museum on day of performance.
* 30 & Under Rush: $15 tickets for ticket buyers 30 years and younger, with proof of age, the day of the event (subject to availability). For more information, visit www.metmuseum.org/tickets, call 212-570-3949, or visit the box office.
* Bring the Kids!: $1 tickets for children (ages 7-16) when accompanied by an adult with a full-price ticket (subject to availability). For more information, visit www.metmuseum.org/tickets, call 212-570-3949 or visit the box office.
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August 13, 2012
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