Remixing Antarctica

“[T]ruth itself is a remix,” writes Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in his new project of projections, The Book of Ice. The book is one element of a hexagonally amplified process that led Miller to Antarctica for four weeks in late 2007 to sample that landscape and remix it: sonically, graphically, scientifically, cinematically, emotionally, paradoxically. Embedded with graphs and graphic design (maps, charts, blueprints, timeline, diagrams), archival and contemporary photographs, multimedia content ranging from short symphonic films to downloadable propaganda posters (accessed through Quick Response, or QR, codes that can be scanned with a mobile device, like the black-and-white boxes at the start and end of this review), interviews, and preface by the noted physicist, Brian Greene: the “book” of ice encapsulates a truth as much as ice is able—thawing as we speak.

Ice derives from the Old English “is,” Miller tells us, and from the outset, we feel The Book of Ice is more verb than noun, less stagnant than kinetic, less object than subject: undergoing shifting subjectifications. Miller describes the continent as a cracked mirror held up to ourselves, a projection surface not only visually but also aurally: to see and to hear. “[A]ny sound can be you,” he writes, as if the listener/reader/viewer is an instrument being tuned by and tuning the continent through interdependent planetary motions, not unlike the antiquated notion of the Music of the Spheres.

The Book of Ice doesn’t resemble the environmental writings of Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, or Rachel Carson, yet it belongs in that lineage, remixing advocacy and awe into a kind of “visual hip-hop” and “info-aesthetics,” engaging waxing and waning technologies that spin our ideas of landscape, if not the landscape itself—the idea of Antarctica, unreachable to most and melting—into a white noise that overpowers the calving, cracking, crystallizing sounds that dissipate into a semblance of silence, the sound of science, buzzing in our brains.

A tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? A continent melts away at the bottom of the planet but nobody hears it. Does that mean it doesn’t exist?

The Book of Ice remixes advocacy and awe into a kind of “visual hip-hop” and “info-aesthetics.”

The Greeks named antarktikos opposite of the Arctic (Arktos being “The Bear”), although they never visited—like many of us whose notions of Antarctica bear themselves out along the surface of our imaginations. Our concept amalgamates by degrees of separation: from near-death tales of explorers like Shackleton and Scott, to penguins penguins penguins, complicated by films like Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Miller goes over the edge, remixing these and more, diving into an archive that plays back: ice’s molecular structure and sonifications, “collateralized debt,” Fluxus to Afrofuturism, colonization to consumerism, Ice-T to a water bottle factiously labeled “100% Pure Melted Continent.” Played out through his acoustic palate, Miller appeals to a lineage of music inspired by landscape (from the works of John Cage to Ralph Vaughan Williams to Cornelius Cardew) to compose a score about the plight of our planet and our (in)ability to listen, think, act.

Known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid (a moniker that dates from college, adopted from Sigmund Freud’s notion of “the uncanny,” how “people assign qualities to objects around them that may not exist”), Miller works as a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. His works have appeared internationally in galleries, museums, and venues including the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennial for Architecture, and Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He conceived of The Book of Ice as one component of a larger multimedia portrait of a rapidly transforming continent, and the accompanying symphony, Terra Nova, was commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival and debuted at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. His earlier books include Rhythm Science (2004) and Sound Unbound (2008) (both from MIT Press), as well as the cinematic Rebirth of...