Mixing it up Dj Spooky crafts art from the chaotic flow BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

FirstWorksProv certainly is getting a lot of mileage out of its artist-in-residence, but then Paul D. Miller — aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid — wears several hats. The New York conceptual artist, writer, and musician will be presenting three programs around town.

The events run the gamut:

On October 14 from 4 to 6 p.m. at Providence Black Repertory Company, he will add an informed voice to a forum on "Politics & Propaganda." Admission is free.

On October 15 at 7 p.m. at the RISD Auditorium, "Rhythm Science" is the title of his talk on the history of digital arts, as well as the title of his recently published book-length manifesto on creating art "from the flow of patterns in sound and culture." Admission is free.

On October 17 at 8 p.m. at the VMA Arts & Cultural Center, Dj Spooky will present Rebirth of a Nation, a live multi-media remix of D.W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. Tickets are $12 to $20.

That last work was commissioned by Lincoln Center and the Spoleto Festival. He has written for numerous publications, from The Village Voice and Artforum to Raygun and Rap Pages. The first editor-at-large of Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture, he is also co-publisher of the multi-cultural magazine A Gathering of the Tribes. As an artist, his work has appeared in venues as diverse as the Whitney Biennial and the 2000 Venice Biennial for Architecture. A major figure as a DJ on the New York club scene, he has worked with musicians from Yoko Ono to Killa Priest of Wu-Tang Clan, and he composed the hip-hop score to the 1998 Cannes and Sundance award-winning film Slam.

Miller, 34, is a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he double-majored in philosophy and French literature — though you can’t find that information on his hip persona’s website, djspooky.com. Onsite he does admit to being a "faculty member" — his quotes — of the European Graduate School, which he has described as "an experimental environment for discussion of issues involving contemporary culture outside of a normal academic environment — it’s kind of like a ‘Black Mountain College’ of the early 21st century."

He spoke by phone recently about his work.

Q: Your first book, Rhythm Science, came out this year, which you devote to discussing how art can be created out of the chaotic flow around us. When did you first get fascinated with the subject?

A: When I was in school I was thinking about a lot of issues around how we’re just bombarded with everything. It was just the beginning of the whole era of the Gulf War, the fall of the Soviet scene — seeing an entire nation-state undergo this huge transformation. Somehow it made me feel like, "Wow, I just can’t believe it." I was young, growing up, thinking about all these transformations. And the funny thing is, it didn’t feel like a quote-unquote "end," it felt like it was a beginning . . . Massive, constant transformation. And America, somehow, has this illusion of stability, you know.

The ’90s became the era of how we were conditioned so much by media that began to be everywhere in so many different forms. I remember when I was first on campus and they barely had Internet. This is in the ancient early ’90s, and now it’s like a second skin around all the planet . . . Half the world’s population hasn’t even made a phone call yet, while we in the industrialized world are moving farther into these kind of mediated environments. It’s just a massive turning point. For better or worse, most people get their reality from TV.

Q: We get most of our stimuli visually. You point out that a DJ guides our attention the same pre-conscious way with sounds. You speak of your DJ mixes employing "selection of sound as narrative."

A: It’s just making out the world that’s just totally fragmented, [making] the situation a little more fun . . . These kinds of funny, for lack of a better word, semiotic relations between fragments of media and how we think about that, how we make them active, this is all — it should be part of how human beings relate to machines. Like the funny thing is, sampling isn’t just taking a snippet of one record and mixing it with another — you’re creating an active structure, which is like an abstract machine. So I’m always thinking about how memory works with sampling — slicing and dicing all these different memories. I guess as an artist I’m really intrigued with the way we have now . . . outsourced parts of our memory to memory devices — iPods, computers, whatever. And we’re just seeing the same kind of effects going on with the economy as we’re seeing with our relationships to these devices.

Q: Some might see that and be inspired by our expanding awareness. After all, if you can put part of your awareness in your back pocket, you’re a bigger person.

A: Yes and no . . . If you update that formula and remix it a little bit, to apply the DJ term: a lot of people, if you ask them about things, they can’t remember. It’s an attention deficit disorder. Everything’s in fragments, and that’s probably because we don’t remember things the same way anymore. West Africa and most other cultures have long oral histories — if you’re a bard or going from town to town in medieval Europe or you’re a storyteller, you have to remember all of these little snippets and the way they work for the story. But for us the story is all cut up — media, movies, soundtracks, whatever.

Q: Is there anything that makes up for that, in your mind?

A: Well, you realize how right McLuhan was. I’ve been reading McLuhan recently. He and Philip Dick are two of my favorite weird ’60s writers, and they both seem extremely current. The good part is that, yeah, with globalization and with the fact that more and more people are accessing information, you have a basic human idealism.

Q: What about on the personal level, in terms of individual human consciousness?

A: Well, I’m an idealist. I really think a lot of things can be done, and I really believe that at core most people are progressive. In the 20th century, all these mass wars being based on propaganda, all these kinds of media myths — whether you were with the Soviet Union or whether you were with Germany in the ’30s or America in the ’50s. The current situation seems very propaganda-oriented, totally over the top. And people on some unconscious level aren’t necessarily questioning it. That’s what so weird about it . . . It’s an optimistic and also a cynical time.

Once we’re presented with all these possibilities, OK, great, we can all make a movie, we can all have iTunes on our desktops to download all your favorite music to put in your back pocket. But what does that do to reality? We need to look at ourselves and the country we’re living in.

Q: In that context, what were you trying to get across in your remix of Birth of a Nation?

A: My favorite riff on this is that phrase from Santayana, the philosopher, who said those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I was really intrigued with the election of 2000: the whole voting process for African-Americans in Florida, basically they just said, "All right, you guys are not voting the way we want you to vote, so you’re not going to vote." Those kind of election shenanigans, that’s going to come home to roost.

That was the inspiration for the film. Based on: "You know what? This is still going on — holy shit!" I mean, will people ever just think of the past and try and do something different? It doesn’t need to be this way.

Go to www.firstworksprov.org for details on the festival.