<incom> DJ-Spooky at the Luanda Triennial

[Geert Lovink]

> From: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1 at earthlink.net>
>
> Hey you all - I'm in Luanda, Angola now. 5 power outtages in 3 hours, 
> 3rd world style, y'all!
>
> Anyway, yeah, if you all have any friends in this part of the world, 
> the opening for the Triennial is coming up. I've included some info on 
> the Triennnial, and the basic idea for the piece I have in it. It'll 
> be projected throughout a old slave fortress on the coast just outside 
> of the city.
>
> Paul
>
> press blurb: http://www.trienal-de-luanda.net/
>
> Paul D. Miller
>
> New York is Now (2006)
>
> Especially created for the Luanda Triennial in 2006, Paul D. Miller’s 
> “New York is Now (2006)" is a response to the conditions art reflects 
> in the 21st century’s fast paced and completely networked global 
> culture. Miller has long been at home on the global scene of digital 
> culture – as a writer, artist and musician, his work has focused on 
> the intricate relationships between what he views as urban culture’s 
> uncanny relationship to the production processes of digital media. 
> With “New York is Now” he explores how memory works in tandem with 
> found archival footage to create a tapestry of a city made of 
> improvisations, disjunctions, and multiple rhythms. Inspired by 
> Ornette Coleman’s classic free jazz album of 1968, Miller has gone 
> through thousands of film portraits of the city that has inspired his 
> work. New York has long been considered a global starting point for 
> many of the most important artists of the last century, and Miller 
> starts with the poem “Mannahatta” by Walt Whitman and rapidly moves 
> through a series of architectural invocations that leave the viewer 
> with a sense that the “city” for Miller, like Coleman, is a structure 
> made of many rhythms, some local, some global, - all syncopated to a 
> collage based aesthetic. For the Luanda Triennial, Miller creates a 
> collage tapestry of New York through the prism of jazz, and found 
> footage appropriated from material as diverse as Duke Ellington’s 
> “Harlem Tone Poem,” Hans Arp’s “Rhythmus 21,”,Situationist architect 
> Constant’s “Manifesto for a New Babylon,” Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic 
> Cinema,” Meilies “l’homme orchestre,” Thomas Edison’s portraits of the 
> electrification of Coney Island, George Antheil’s “Ballet 
> Mechanique”and many other bits and pieces from the 20th century. In 
> essence, “New York is Now” is a video portrait of a New York at the 
> edge of the recorded imagination – a city made of many rhythms and 
> tempos. Miller’s composition looks at history, cinema, and how the we 
> think about urbanism in the 21st century. The science fiction writer 
> William Gibson once wrote “the future is already here, it’s just 
> unevenly distributed.” Miller reveals to us how much this phrase has 
> come to mean in the realm of digital media as an artform that reveals 
> many of the hidden connections between the way we live in the 21st 
> century’s media dense, global information economy. “New York is Now” 
> posits a place where all these visions of the urban landscape exist 
> simultaneously.