Rhythm Science is the new, and first, book by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
DJ Spooky’s albums (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Viral Sonata) and mixtapes (Under the Influence, Modern Mantra) are powerfully sharp and complex works. What’s great about these CDs is how they manage to be, at the same time, wildly eclectic and yet tightly focused and singular. Miller/Spooky is on the cutting edge of true, radical hybridity: his work is about citation/sampling/cutting-up as tools of innovation and metamorphosis.
Spooky’s music thus stands as a sharp reproach both to the superstitious reverence for “roots” (which usually means white people idolizing and exhuming a long-ago musical form pioneered by people of color, while ignoring or scorning what said people of color are doing now, in the present) and to the shallow, faux rainbow hybridity that corporations love (We Are the World, United Colors of Benetton). In contrast to both these trends (which have more in common than either of them would want to admit) DJ Spooky insists on making it new: breaking with modernist forms and categories, embracing the flux of postmodern commodity culture, is the only way to be true to that radical modernist imperative.
Rhythm Science, the book, is Miller/Spooky’s explication of, and meditation upon, his artistic methods and goals. The book’s motto could be the sentence of Emerson’s that is quoted on page 68: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” Miller doesn’t make a linear, philosophical argument, so much as he mixes theory, history, anecdote, autobiography and scientific research, all of these flowing in and out and free associating from one page to the next.
What Rhythm Science really is, is a manifesto: the first important avant-garde artistic manifesto of the twenty-first century. It’s a utopian book, in that it focuses, with hope, on the maximal potentialities of the remix in postmodern, network culture. I find it bracing and refreshing, because of how it provides a corrective to my own tendencies to be pessimistic about how those potentialities will most likely be captured, co-opted, and crushed by giant corporations before they have had a chance even to blossom. In his writing as in his music, Paul Miller works to “keep hope alive,” something we desperately need right now, in these horrendous times of George W. Bush and Mel Gibson.
The design of the Rhythm Science book also needs to be mentioned, because it is both innovative and beautiful. The book is designed to mimic both a vinyl record and a CD, with a hole in the center; pages of collage (abstract images, vector graphics, and quotations sampled from the text) alternate with pages of actual text, and the pages themselves differ in texture, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth. There’s also a CD that comes along with the book, in which Spooky/Miller mixes electronic sounds with voice recordings of great modernist authors (Tzara, Artaud, Joyce, and Stein, among others).
As an object, therefore, the book eschews linearity and embraces the audio-tactile aesthetic that Marshall McLuhan identified with electronic media. And this design itself really is something new, rather than being (as too many recent hip media projects have tended to be) an imitation of the style that Marshall McLuhan pioneered in the 1960s in collaboration with Quentin Fiore (in books like The Medium is the Massage).
Rhythm Science
Rhythm Science is the new, and first, book by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
DJ Spooky’s albums (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Viral Sonata) and mixtapes (Under the Influence, Modern Mantra) are powerfully sharp and complex works. What’s great about these CDs is how they manage to be, at the same time, wildly eclectic and yet tightly focused and singular. Miller/Spooky is on the cutting edge of true, radical hybridity: his work is about citation/sampling/cutting-up as tools of innovation and metamorphosis.
Spooky’s music thus stands as a sharp reproach both to the superstitious reverence for “roots” (which usually means white people idolizing and exhuming a long-ago musical form pioneered by people of color, while ignoring or scorning what said people of color are doing now, in the present) and to the shallow, faux rainbow hybridity that corporations love (We Are the World, United Colors of Benetton). In contrast to both these trends (which have more in common than either of them would want to admit) DJ Spooky insists on making it new: breaking with modernist forms and categories, embracing the flux of postmodern commodity culture, is the only way to be true to that radical modernist imperative.
Rhythm Science, the book, is Miller/Spooky’s explication of, and meditation upon, his artistic methods and goals. The book’s motto could be the sentence of Emerson’s that is quoted on page 68: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” Miller doesn’t make a linear, philosophical argument, so much as he mixes theory, history, anecdote, autobiography and scientific research, all of these flowing in and out and free associating from one page to the next.
What Rhythm Science really is, is a manifesto: the first important avant-garde artistic manifesto of the twenty-first century. It’s a utopian book, in that it focuses, with hope, on the maximal potentialities of the remix in postmodern, network culture. I find it bracing and refreshing, because of how it provides a corrective to my own tendencies to be pessimistic about how those potentialities will most likely be captured, co-opted, and crushed by giant corporations before they have had a chance even to blossom. In his writing as in his music, Paul Miller works to “keep hope alive,” something we desperately need right now, in these horrendous times of George W. Bush and Mel Gibson.
The design of the Rhythm Science book also needs to be mentioned, because it is both innovative and beautiful. The book is designed to mimic both a vinyl record and a CD, with a hole in the center; pages of collage (abstract images, vector graphics, and quotations sampled from the text) alternate with pages of actual text, and the pages themselves differ in texture, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth. There’s also a CD that comes along with the book, in which Spooky/Miller mixes electronic sounds with voice recordings of great modernist authors (Tzara, Artaud, Joyce, and Stein, among others).
As an object, therefore, the book eschews linearity and embraces the audio-tactile aesthetic that Marshall McLuhan identified with electronic media. And this design itself really is something new, rather than being (as too many recent hip media projects have tended to be) an imitation of the style that Marshall McLuhan pioneered in the 1960s in collaboration with Quentin Fiore (in books like The Medium is the Massage).