Paul Miller (DJ Spooky)

On June 25, the Digital October center hosted a lecture by one of the most brilliant figures of the New York underground of the 1990s, a maker of five albums and an incredible number of culturological works, and one of the word’s greatest specialists in the field of multimedia art — Paul Miller, also known as DJ Spooky.

Works by Miller have been published in the popular press: from the avant-garde British publishing house of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Paul Miller has carried out a multimedia, multidisciplinary investigation of Antarctica, which he has published in his The Book of Ice. Miller looks at Antarctica through the prism of graphic design and contemporary digital media as a penetrating example of the interaction of man with nature.

His remix of Dziga Vertov films Kino-Glaz/Kino-Pravda, the first YouTube director, as DJ Spooky calls him, reflects a passion for realism and synthesis from archival sources characteristic of the 21^st century and connects this with a number of historical conceptions of which Vertov was the initiator. DJ Spooky reminds us that everything new is something old that has been forgotten. He has reworked the soundtrack and made a remix of Dzigi Vertov’s films in the form of a contemporary score based on a combination of the art of video montage and his work as a composer, artist, and writer. This is a first step toward understanding how a 20^th-century cinematographer set the tone for the info-aesthetics of the 21^st century.

During his presentation, Paul Miller talked about how an aesthetics of contemporary digital media are developing, at the basis of which lie many already-created works of art and the interaction of man with the surrounding world.