Paul D Miller: Rebirth of a Nation
14 January
www.djspooky.com
For the past decade Paul D Miller (aka DJ
Spooky That Subliminal Kid) has been recognised with increasing acclaim in
two distinct cultural fields: the popular world of electronic music, where
Spooky is a cutting-edge DJ, and the more elite world of contemporary art,
where the New York-based Miller has presented audio works, paintings and,
more recently, digital prints. With the recent release of his 128-page
manifesto, Rhythm Science (2004), it’s easy to see why Miller is so
acclaimed. An artist who uses multiple forms of digital technology to
explore the development of hybrid forms of human identity in today’s global
networks, his is a powerful manifestation of the cybernetic aesthetic that
pervades both contemporary art and popular culture today.
Miller’s Rebirth of a Nation is a ‘remix’ of DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
(1915), the blockbuster silent film about the American Civil War and the
Southern Reconstruction. For nearly a century Griffith’s film has been
rightly regarded as both brilliant and heinous. Its narrative complexity is
staggering for a film of its day, combining a fast-paced story with exciting
chases, dynamic crowd scenes, dramatic battle sequences and stunning outdoor
photography. At the same time, it is an extremely vehement piece of racist
propaganda, presenting images that demonised African Americans and justified
their torture and murder at the hands of
the Ku Klux Klan.
Miller’s Rebirth… unfolded across three separate screens. The central screen
presented an edited, mostly chronological version of the original film,
sequences of shots and intertitles which were digitally filtered or overlaid
with a variety of different types of moving image, including shots from
other narrative sequences in the film, circuit diagrams, maps, geometrical
frames and excerpts from two Bill T Jones dance pieces. The two outer
screens presented identical images, consisting of flashbacks or
flash-forwards of the ambiguous central story. Miller’s remix cut the
original film down to one-third of its original three-hour length. By
repeating significant shots and sequences, he focused on the racism of
Griffith’s film, as well as its central political and romantic storylines,
which involve the intertwined lives of a Southern and a Northern family.
Rebirth… was performed live. Miller mixed both audio and video as the film
unfolded. The score was eerie, quiet and unsettling – a mix of bells,
violins and orchestra sounds with occasional hip-hop beats and, at one point
(during the infamous Reconstruction Statehouse scene), an echoing sample of
Robert Johnson singing the blues. Miller seemed to mix the music fairly
continuously. It was less easy to tell, however, how much the video was
mixed live. Because the narrative remained coherent, it seemed that Miller
only mixed the two side screens.
Miller’s remix emphasised the uncanny parallels between the world that
Griffith represented and the brave new world of today. Both worlds, it
suggested, are beset with wars and violence, ethnic and gender stereotypes,
terrors of migration and miscegenation and fears of stolen elections and the
abuse of power. At the end of Rebirth… the Klan has triumphed, just as it
did in the original version, and the North and South have once again been
united in the false unity of their shared ‘ethnic’ whiteness. Yet the
naturalness of this state of affairs has been thoroughly undermined by
Miller’s live performance which, while echoing the earliest days of cinema
with its live musical accompaniment, also shows how radically things have
changed today as a result of globalisation and digital technologies.
Matthew Biro