Rhythm Science, by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Reviewed by Jamey Hecht
Cover of Rhythm Science, by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.
What is the opposite of a one-man show of my own fingernail parings, signatures, and unique medical waste? Collage! A mixture of fragments (I know: "no mo’ po-mo, mo-fo") assembled in the gallery from the many, many, many places where I "found" them. While celebrating the anonymous and collective origins of the mixture, I put my name to it anyway. You participate; I’m in charge. My signature makes a mockery of the triumphant impersonalism that got me the gig. But this is all to the good, because I’d better have a little bit of bourgeois individuality left to subvert or it’s all soup and no spoon. The brand will collapse without a logo.
If you want to get the essence of this anti-essentialist post-modernism, ask French literary theoreticians Delleuze and Guattari:
"[U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple… It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion."
I’ll stop there, but if you’ve ever read any of the zillion articles on "hypertext" you know where all this ended up. Now here’s a slice of the product description for Dj Spooky’s new book, http://rhythmscience.com/ Rhythm Science:
The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science–the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, "the changing same." Taking the Dj’s mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn’t stay in one place.
And from the book itself:
It’s been said that language is a virus, so sounds and words multiply, becoming viral agents of an omni-sensory condition, a compilation of local, distant, and virtual spaces, all evoked in this essay by sound.
Virus, rhizome, whatever. When the buzz about DJ Spooky’s new book invited me to "an omni-sensory condition," my expectations were down at ankle level. I expect to get hype about how, up until this very product, there were only naïve 19th Century novels and poems and paintings and music; until this latest collage / sampling mix, there were only European monumental Salon paintings and pompous symphonies for the greater glory of the Czar. Thanks, Spooky!
But I was wrong. I liked it. Most of it was found objects, but that doesn’t matter. If you can’t make the beads, you can string them together and the result will indeed be a necklace. From my perspective, the language about the book-and-cd is tiresome, since nobody in the northern hemisphere needs to be reminded that "information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn’t stay in one place." But the music itself is nice. The work of Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, is tasty.
