rhythm science

paul d miller – rhythm science
mit 2004

[4] Dig beneath what lies on the surface only to arrive where you started. It’s a circular logic, a database logic. Surface meets surface in a translation game of chilled desire. // ..any word you say is already known. // The idiot as processing device, slave to the moment, outside of time because for him there is only moment o thought. No past, no present, no future.. The person without qualities who cannot say “I”. The person whom others speak through, who has no central identity save what he or she knows. // Home is where your cell phone is. An absurd reductionist logic? Plastic, fluid memories run into circuitry and focus our attention on a world where we download ourselves daily. This is a word game of the nonconscious. // Why do you like the sounds of electronic music? Because you need to. // As George Santayana said so long ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That’s one scenario. // We have the machines to repeat history for us.

[12] Creating “Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid” identity allowed me to spin narratives on several fronts at the same time and to produce persona as the shareware. I started Dj-ing as a conceptual art project, but as the Spooky persona took on a life of its own, I came to regard it as a social sculpture, coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity. // Dreams and basic nighttime thought processes generate the most creative sounds. // Future generations won’t have a “dependence” on technology. They will have technology as a core aspect of their existence.. The dependence is basically part of the process of being human. // Dj-ing lets you take the best of what’s out there and give your own take on it.

[20] Without imagination, everything is empty. // In the twenty-first century, stories disappear and evaporate as soon as they’re heard, a sonic and cultural entropy. // Jean Baudrillard observers: “In spite of himself, the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion. The schizophrenic is not, as generally claimed, characterized by the loss of touch with reality, but by the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness with things [by] overexposure to the transparency of the world.” // Blues musicians speak of “going to the crossroads” - that space where everyone could play the same song but flipped it every which way until it became “their own sound.” // It’s all about algorithms: code is beats is rhythm is algorithm is digital. // The present moment has been deleted. Any sound can be you: that’s the idea of the nomad idea. // ..That’s what makes a good party; when there’s different shit going on, not just the same music all night. It’s the twenty-first century. Things should be really wild. Anything else is boring.

[25] The samples and fragments speak the unspoken, the ascent remains unbroken. Nu-bop, nu-forms, nu-soundz: Flip the script, open the equation, check the situation. Guy Debord used to call this style detournement, Sigmund Freud called it uncanny – we call it wildstyle. We call it carnival. We call it parade. // We’re in a delirium of saturation. We’re never going to remember anything exactly the way it happened. Memories become ever more fragmented and subjective. // If I internalize the environment around me, who is going to control how the information eventually resurfaces?

[32] Replication as differentiated from mere reproduction. Replication as it stands derived from “reply”: the copies transcend the originals, the original is nothing but a collection of previous cultural movements. Flow..

[36] I created DJ Spooky persona as a distinct art project and then saw it take on a life of its own in the mixed tape scene of the mid-1990s. // The twenty-first century started like a bad cut-up video: too much of everything all the time. // Frankly, by the start of the twenty-first century, the academy is such a reflection of class structure and hierarchy that it tends to cloud any real prograssive contexts of criticism and discourse. By Dj-ing, making art, and writing simultaneously, I tried to bypass the notion of the crtiic as an authority who controls narrative, and to create a new role that’s resonant with web culture: to function as content provider, producer, and critic all at the same time. // In this day and age, given shareware culture and its impact on those so-called majors, artists can and should build their own platforms and can have as big an impact – if they pay attention to the game.

[56] It doesn’t matter if it’s not consistent, there’s a market or niche for every possible endeavor under the sun. // So many media and cultural techniques of interpretation coexist – reading, watching, listening, surfing, dancing – that this textual/sonic synaesthesia demands a great deal from us. Yet in pop culture, the deadly inertia can put a stop to the idealism of coexistence. People can become so unreflective in their usual media-habits that any kind of systemic renewal takes a long time to succeed. // If I were a dead serious artist guy, who wanted to just strictly be in all the right collections, and network the gallery scene, that’s easily done. // Identity is about creating an environment where you can make the world act as your own reflection. // “Born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight in this American world,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the African American condition, we are faced with “a world which yields.. no tru self consciousness, but only lets [us] see [ourselves] through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.. // Charles Mingus: “I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two.” // Biggie Smalls: “So what if I contradict myself – I am large, I contain multitudes.”

[68] Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.” // Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own. The mechanization of war, the electro-colonization of information, the hypercommodification of culture, the exponential growth of mass media – all of these point to a machinic/semiotic hierarchy of representation that models human thought as a distributed network.. We are witnessing and listening to the complete integration of and simultaneous representation of the human world as a single conscious entity based on the implosion of geographic distance or cartographic failure. // Today we have an entire youth culture based on the premise of replication, which itself derives from the word “reply”. // Today’s notion of creativity and originality are configured by velocity: it is a blur, a constellation of styles, a knowledge and pleasure in the play of surfaces, a rejection of history as objective force in favor of subjective interpretations of its residue, a relish for copies and repetition, and so on. We inhabit a cultural zone informed by what Giles Deleuze liked to call a “logic of the particular,” a place where the subjective, multiple, interpretations of information lead us to take the real as a kind of consensual, manufactured situation.

[77] Screen time. Prime Time: Life as a boundless-level video game with an infinite array of characters to pick from. // “Now” becomes a method for exploring the coded landscapes of contemporary post-industrial reality, a hypgnagogic flux, a Situationist reverie, a psychogeography – a dérivé without beginning or end. // “Money is time, but time is not money,” is another attitude we inherit from the past century: from the “clockwork economy” of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 on up to the hypercondensed aesthetics of commercials and videos on MTV. // I like to think of the kind of writing in Rhythm and Science as script information – the self as “subject-in-synchronization” (the moving parts aligned in the viewfinder of an other), rather than the old twentieth-century inheritance of the Cartesian subject-object relation.

[89] So I’m sitting here at the airport, looking forward to a transfer in Frankfurt, and then a day flight back to NYC. I’ll be there for a day, and then I’m off to Sweden and Denmark for four days. I just got “here” but the only real reason to be here is to go someplace else.. I look at my wristwatch and check the time in several time zones, make a couple of phone calls to different people who I know are awake in the different geographic regions I need to deal with, and then try to pass the time by reading. I get on-line to check in on a couple different listservs that I subscribe to, and while it’s all going I restart the CD player that I’m listening to go into “loop” mode ‘cause hey, I don’t feel like starting the damn thing over again. // From math to code to culture, contemporary art has shifted as well. It all seems more and more that the creative act itself is becoming a source-code like Linux where people create and add modules of thought-ware to the mix, making it all a little more interesting. // I’m at the airport waiting for my next flight. That’s about as existential as you can get in these days of hyper-modernity.

[100] Move into the frame, get the picture, re-invent your name. Movement, flow, flux: the nomad takes on the sedentary qualities of the urban dweller. Movement on the screen becomes an omnipresent quality. Absolute time becomes dream machine flicker. The eyes move. The body stays still. Travel. Big picutre small frame, so what’s the name of the game? All at once, the digital codes becomes symbol and synecdoche, sign and signification.

[108] You are alone in a garden of memory in an Eden with no script and no temptation. The apple of knowledge is an ad on a website somewhere. Enter keyword “truth,” and the search engine brings you conflicting meanings. That’s the prostitute’s revenge: so many people, so little time. // The prostitute scenario is about an end of definitions – breaking the loops, and watching the role collapse in on itself when it’s no longer occupied. // Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.. Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. // My challenge to myself is to always try to create new worlds, new scenarios at almost every moment of thought. The transactions I speak of take me outside of the normal cash flow of role playing because it’s multiple. Into the picture, into the frame – that’s the name of the game. // Messages need to be delivered, codes need to be interpreted, and information, always, is hungry for new routes to move through. // If architecture is nothing but frozen music, philosophy is the music that forms the sound track of this transaction. // “Act global, think local.” This is what Dj-ing tells us in the era of the sample. // The options are almost infinite in terms of sound construction. The best way would be to implode and see what’s inside.