As our society generates more and more data, with each new data set replacing the old, the information of the past can be easily devalued (I’m not sure if the information is devalued) and forgotten.The forgotten information can be resurfaced by artists who find or remember its value to our society. There are artists who dig out materials such as images, objects, films, audio, and texts of the past to “make historical information often lost or displaced, physically present” (Foster P.4). A DJ, composer, author, and multimedia artist, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid) perfectly fits in the category of archival artist. In his book, Rhythm Science, Miller describes the phonograph as “a method of having access to the past” (Rhythm Science Location 601). A phonograph is a recording machine that was invented by Thomas Edison. It records and reproduces sound. Sound is temporary and can only exist in the instance when the sound is produced. Reproduction of the sound is indeed a way to revisit the past.
In his film/music/literature project, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, Miller tried to record an acoustic portrait of the landscape which is constantly changed by global warming and natural erosion. So he went to Antarctica with portable recording equipment to sample sounds of the ice and the water and images of the environment in Antarctica. Antarctica is not a piece of landscape that is accessible for us as ordinary citizens since it is not really a land where humans can easily live, nor is it governed by any country. Antarctica is like a mystery or a huge chunk of unknown information. Miller recorded sounds and noises that could never be replayed unless somebody records them. Those audio materials are sampled throughout the film. He explains what audio sampling is in TED x Austin presentation. “You take something that everybody kind of knows. You flip it. You edit it and transform it. And it becomes something new that still has a trace of that memory.” (Youtube.com) DJs are, in a way, archival artists who collect sounds such as vinyl records or any format of music or sounds and mix them with tracks to create something new, which still has bits of the old or the past that the audience can identify or relate to.
The process of archival art can be as extreme as “transformation of materiality” (Wallach P.66). Just as in the digitization of images and sounds or exporting in different file formats, archival artists are free to transform a material into something different so the audience can physically experience the material. As a part of the Terra Nova project, Miller created a music album called Of Water and Ice. In this album, he treated information as compositional materials such as creating sounds through “interpretations of either algorithms that mirror the geometry in ice crystals or the math of climate change data” (Jamendo.com). For him, information is not simply information. A piece of information can be transformed into something else to be digested in a different way. As Ann Hamilton burns words and transforms them into the smell of smoke on the horsehair, the audience experiences the words through their sense of smell and the tangible material of the horsehair. In Miller’s Of Water and Ice, the audience experiences the information of the ice and water sonically.
Archival art is not just informative databases or bare facts displayed in front of the audience but communicates the artist’s voice through how collected materials are displayed. The audience of archival art is “invited to meditate upon the ways in which memory is both personal – shaped by subjective, inexplicably private experience – and generational – structured by the constant epochal process of culture as the renewal of forms” (Stewart P.293). In other words, the audience is required to participate in their own way of understanding of the archival arts. If there is no audience, the archival art is incomplete or meaningless. DJing is not only art, but at the same time, it is entertainment. The art needs to be constantly transformed in order to entertain the audience in different ways. As Miller says, “You can never play a record the same way for the same crowd. That’s why remixes happen. Memory demands newness. You have to always update your archive” (Rhythm Science Location 970). There are of course remix versions of tracks in Of Water and Ice album.
The process of archival art is endless and expands like a “rhizome” (Foster p.6). How archives of sounds branch out might be different from what Foster explains in his essay on archival art. Ramification of music archive may be considered as different versions of remixes done by a single artist or multiple artists who are interested in exposing his/her narrative by manipulating the original sounds. If ramification is not limited to an audio format, Miller successfully extends the material Antarctica in different formats such as in a film, an audio album and in literature including graphic designs and texts. Again transformation of materiality is important because archives in different formats can stimulate the audience’s senses in various way. Also, probably those formats are how Miller as an artist remembers Antarctica.
Miller as an intellectual multimedia artist successfully archives information provided by nature such as sounds, noises and movements and data sets in number provided by scientific observation of nature. However, archival art does not have to be something that is exclusively done by professional artists. Anybody can archive information aesthetically even though there are levels of aesthetics and scales. We have tools to customize information due to the advancement of technology. YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, instagram are just a few of softwares and applications that we can use to display information that we collect personally. There are apps that are for mixing music. There are apps for editing videos. In Sound Unbound, which is a collection of essays edited by Miller, Ken Jordan, a digital multimedia consultant explains what art and information are. “Sound is information, just as are images, words, smells, gestures, or haptic impulses sensed through the skin. The shaping of this information for aesthetic purposes is the common strategy of the arts” (Sound Unbound p.249). Therefore, anybody can shape information within their own aesthetic measure. There is no rule or definition of what archival art is. As long as you believe in the value of collected materials and display them in the way you want, it is an archival art.
Works Cited
Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October 110 (2004): 3-22. Print.
Miller, Paul D. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Kindle Edition.
Miller, Paul D., and Peter Lunenfeld. Rhythm Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Kindle Edition
“Of Water and Ice.” Jamendo.Web. 9/20/2014 <https://www.jamendo.com/en/list/a122759/of-water-and-ice>.
Susan Stewart, “Wunderkammer: An After as Before” In Ingrid Schaffner & Matthias Winzen, Eds., Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art (New York: Prestel, 1998).
“TEDxAustin – Paul “DJ Spooky” Miller.” Youtube.com.Web. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYUEOqwOOW8>.
Wallach, Amei. “A Conversation with Ann Hamilton in Ohio.” American art 22.1 (2008): 52-77. Print.
*Prezi presentation can be found at
http://prezi.com/f7rzdj3ehmji/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy