DJ Spooky introduces his new iPhone Application.

via subliminalspooky:

DJ Player has teamed up with DJ Spooky and Thirsty Ear Recordings to bring you the next-generation mixable DJ Album format for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The App is using the same technology behind DJ Player to allow you to play a smooth mix of tracks from the album and to mix the tracks yourself using the built-in mixer.

The App includes 7 tracks of songs and remixes from The Secret Song album, and exclusive DJ Spooky sound effects.

The App is going to be available soon in iTunes App Store.

DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) talks about the history of media and thoughts about media in culture.

He discusses and demonstrates the unexpected side effects of free speech, law, and copyright while showing the power of remixed art.

Miller always has interesting ideas and is a great advocate of free culture, but don’t expect him to connect all the dots!

via UNCChapelHill

Haverford College, in suburban Philadelphia, plays host this coming week to electronic and experimental hip hop musician DJ Spooky, virtual reality guru and composer Jaron Lanier, and Living Colour percussionist Will Calhoun as they gather for an event called “The Sound of Sci(l)ence.” The conference takes place June 15 – 17.

“The Sound of Sci(l)ence: Listening to Quantum Mechanics, the Big Bang, and Nanotechnology,” is a three-day series of conversations, workshops, and performances exploring the intersection of music and quantum mechanics. Supported by a Mellon Arts Residency Planning Grant from Haverford College’s Hurford Humanities Center, the event pairs visiting artists Will Calhoun, Jaron Lanier, and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) with Haverford faculty and students in an effort to widen the scope of quantum mechanics pedagogy through the study of sound, as well locate synergies with courses across the academic disciplines.

Organized by Chemistry professor Joshua Schreier and Physics professor Stephon Alexander, who describe the idea behind the workshop this way:

“Mathematically, quantum mechanics (QM) has many analogies with the classical wave phenomena of sound, and yet the pedagogy of QM is almost entirely visual. This series of conversations and performances will explore how to ‘listen to’ the simple systems used to teach QM, how this can increase student comprehension, reach out to non-technical audiences, and for its own inherently aesthetic benefits. In addition, we would like to explore how this could be used to explore/comprehend our research interests in cosmology and nanoscience. “

The event is FREE, but registration is required. Attendees can register for tickets at this link.

Schedule of Events:

Monday, June 15th

4:00 p.m. Sharpless Auditorium

Open Panel Discussion on Sound and the Physics Curriculum
Speakers: Will Calhoun, Jaron Lanier, Paul Miller/DJ Spooky, Peter Love, Stephon Alexander, and Joshua Schrier

Tuesday, June 16th

12:00 noon Sharpless Auditorium
Screening of Paul Miller/DJ Spooky’s film Rebirth of a Nation
*Snacks provided

4:00 p.m. Hilles 109

Wavedrum Presentation/Workshop with Will Calhoun

Wednesday, June 17th

7:30 p.m. Marshall Auditorium, Roberts Hall
Performance: “The Sound of Sci(l)ence” Featuring Will Calhoun, Jaron Lanier, and Stephon Alexander

Additional Information:

Visiting Artist Will Calhoun is a Grammy Award-winning percussionist and member of Living Colour; winner of multiple drumming awards. Calhoun’s music utilizes both the Korg Wavedrum and the Mandala Drum, integrating banks of effects and other technological enhancements into his performances.

The name Jaron Lanier may be familiar to many readers, for his pioneering work in virtual reality (in fact, it was Lanier who coined the term in the early 1980s).  Founder of VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, Lanier is also a visual artist and composer. At present, he is Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, CET, UC Berkeley.

Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) is an electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is sometimes called “illbient” or “trip hop”. He is a conceptual artist, film-maker, turntablist, and producer.

The Nauru Elegies

A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky in collaboration with Annie Kwon

Artist Statement

Annie K. Kwon and
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It is the world’s smallest independent state and, at its core, represents a place at the most remote extreme of the planet.  Its seemingly utopic geography and landscape stages a dystopic economy and society. 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. In the 1980s, phosphate exports briefly gave Nauruans one of the highest per capita incomes in the Third World. It is anticipated that the phosphate reserves will be completely exhausted before 2050. Despite this, the unemployment rate currently stands at 90%.

As a small territory with no exploitable resources, in the 1990’s Nauru turned to off-shore financing, and the creation of “virtual banks” as a way of earning sorely needed foreign currency. As such, it mirrors the off-shore island economies of The Cayman Islands, and continental havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland.

The Nauru Elegies project looks at the combination of unique qualities that make a remote place like Nauru a core member of the 21st century global economy: It explores an island in a state of environmental collapse. 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, composed by Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, while the architectural component conceptualized by Annie K. Kwon spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation.  A new architecture reclaims a local hypsographic territory at a culmination of global currents.

The poet Goethe once wrote: “architecture is nothing but frozen music.” The Nauru Elegies asks what happens if we reverse engineer that process through on-site recordings and footage translated through the prism of music and architectural form?

Technical write-up

‘The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture’ is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble, projected high-definition video footage, digital animation and live internet feed. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities including research in New York City, documentation in Nauru and performed in Yokohama by local musicians. It is a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.

Audio and video recordings will be taken with the most current and mobile digital technologies in addition to the exploration of medical isosurf modeling techniques appropriated in architectural form and rendering. Economic dynamics will be mapped using current open source satellite and geospatial technologies including NASA World Wind to map hypsometric and bathymetric contours. The Nauru Elegies is realized in multiple technical layers, a manifold performance that has identifiable localities held by a complex global structure.

This is the trailer for DJ Spooky/Paul D. Miller’s large scale multimedia performance work: an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent.

Description:

The Antarctic Suite transforms Miller’s first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. Miller’s field recordings from a portable studio, set up to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress.

Coupled with visual material from Getty Images’ vast collection, The Antarctic Suite is a seventy minute multimedia performance.

The first review I’ve seen of this ambitious DJ work comes from SkyNoise:

Though the publicity heavily emphasised the piece was “conceived, composed and performed by Paul D Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid”, the bulk of performance involves the trio of AlterEgo relentlessly and admirably ploughing through a minimal and repetitive composition. Closing my eyes, all I can think of is how much it reminds me of Philip Glass, and how little it seems to conjure up any antarctic atmosphere. 15-20 minutes into the piece, I start wondering what Spooky is actually doing on stage.

He seems perpetually to be cueing up tracks, adjusting his headphones, adjusting knobs, but nothing can be heard as a result of this, only the ongoing violin, piano and cello riffs, all generously soaked in reverb or delay.

There are a few nice musical moments, a few nice transitions, but it’s only close to the end that I can actually hear some sounds other than the instruments, short loops dropped into the mix by Spooky, that replicate the fast repetitive instrument playing. I suppose they are ‘the sounds of ice’, albeit cropped and toned with some cookie cutter template to suit the composition. Where were the sounds of creaking icebergs? Of ice and water? Of wind and vast landscape? So much for sounds of the ice continent. Or engaging with the musicians on stage. Or for interplay with the video.

I thought “Philip Glass” immediately, on seeing the promo video, too. 

If you’ve had a chance to see this performed, let me know what you think of it. 

As part of its hosting of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver will also host 10 major digital artists from around the world.

The artists will present work which enables citizens to discuss democracy in innovative ways. DJ Spooky of New York joined the mayor at the announcement of Dialog:City Monday, May 5, 2008. The event is being coordinated by the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, whose director, Erin Trapp, outlined the detailed schedule of artist presentations.

via Len Edgerly