it seems to me dj spooky hasn't changed his ways since i last checked 8 years ago: words over substance.

i do think it's cool though that he got others to pay for his trip to antarctica. he's doing something right.

the visual element looked like it had been composed by high school students for a multimedia assignment; thrown together with a mix of “borrowed” footage, probably pinched from archive.org, some random bits of text (which were of course unreadable on one of the screens, given that it was mirrored), and a bunch of spinning graphs that looked like a powerpoint presentation gone horribly wrong.

the music was fine, although sounded suspiciously like a remix/theft of the Qatsi trilogy soundtrack, and i’ll be damned if i can work out what spooky was actually doing on the stage. for all the knobs he twiddled and things he seemed to cue up, all i could hear was alter ego thrashing away on their strings.

the only thing that (temporarily) masked my bitter disappointment at the show was that for a few hours i was completely surprised that such a waste of time had been submitted and accepted to the Melbourne International Arts Festival. once the shock wore off, though, I just really, really wanted to un-see what i’d just seen.