Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky - Biography

Paul D. Miller is well-known as a musician, conceptual artist, and writer based in New York City, also known as 'DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid', his stage name and 'constructed persona'. He was the first editor at large of Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts, and his articles have appeared in The Village Voice, Artforum, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, The Source, and many other magazines and journals. His art work employs a wide array of digitally created music and multi-media to create a form of post-modern sculpture in the tradition of composers such as John Cage and Afrika Bambaata.

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky is the author of Rhythm Science (2004). He has collaborated with many of the world's pre-eminent composers and musicians, including Yoko Ono, Butch Morris, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Iannis Xenakis, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Killa Priest of Wu-Tang Clan, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, and many others. Paul D. Miller's artistic work has appeared internationally in many prestigious exhibitions and galleries, including The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), Vienna Kunsthalle, the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), and the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2000).

Collaboration is very much a part of Paul D. Miller's aesthetic sensibility, and some of his recent projects are collaborations. The project 'Unfinished Stories' is created by DJ Spooky together with Francesca Harper, a dancer and choreographer with Bill Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet company, and Margo Jefferson, a critic for the New York Times and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Paul D. Miller has also been working on several books and novels, including the novel Flow My Blood the DJ Said.

In 2009 Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky presented The Science of Terra Nova at the American Museum of Natural History. This was a presentation of his project called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica on the changing face of Antarctica in the wake of global climate change. In his effort to better understand the fragile environment and ecosystem of Antarctica, Paul D. Miller travelled to the continent with a mobile recording studio in order to capture sounds of ice and the reverberations it produces. The project embraces a multi-media approach, including video, sound, and images.

Perhaps Paul D. Miller's most famous project to date is the film Rebirth of a Nation (2004). The project is a re-working and re-configuration of the infamous D. W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation, created by mixing in different images and sounds with the original in a hyper-mixed style. The aim, according to Paul D. Miller, was to see how the present audiovisual culture of fast editing, loops, and digitization was already configured by the style of D. W. Griffith back in the nineteen-teens. Part of Paul D. Miller's aim in this work is to show how the new is really a different manifestation of the old. It is also an attempt to show how current historical events resonate with the past, especially the uglier aspects of Western, and especially American, society.

The theory behind Paul D. Miller's eclectic aesthetic is outlined in his book Rhythm Science. His ideas on digital media art center around the figure of the DJ as the generalized, post-subjective auteur of postmodern media. The idea of the mix is central to his work and his entire aesthetic, in which disparate connections are made between different times, cultures, and styles, through which something new can emerge. His approach is a source of controversy regarding his heterogeneous oeuvre, which creates unexpected bridges linking the art gallery to the dance club to the concert hall.