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Aesthetics in a Digital Agora
From: Columbia University
| By:
Paul D. Miller |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The digital age has given birth to new forms of artistic expression in visual art, music, writing and film, all of which come into play in the work of the artist DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, aka Paul D. Miller. Miller (right) seeks inspiration in the clash of generations, cultures and philosophical paradigms to create works that transgress traditional art-world divisions. One such collaboration, a short film with the architect Bernard Tschumi, was the subject of the following presentation at a conference on aesthetics at Columbia University. |
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| Alfred Lerner Hall. | |
 hen Bernard Tschumi came to me with this idea about the Alfred Lerner Hall student center, a building that he designed for Columbia University, I thought it was a great critique of the resuscitation of Greek values, in which everyone is talking about the learning center. It's a critique of the notion of the agora, what they call the central gathering spot of the city, although in this place we have the city in microcosm as the university. |
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| DJ Spooky and Bernard Tschumi's Anodyne. | |
What I decided to do was try to translate the building into sound, and what you will see in the movie are abstract elements of the building. It's what I call an algorithmic composition, where one element of a situation generates a whole sequence of other elements that are all interrelated but different. I took different algorithms to transpose the actual structure of the building grids--the ramps and all of its different aspects--into different tone-frequency banks. |
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| DJ Spooky set. | |
Let me play you the sounds that are used to generate the algorithms. With algorithmic composition and algorithmic learning, everything is part of the series of permutations, what are called iterations. So one structure leads to another, which leads to another, and so on and so on. Everything is based on the actual structure of the building. So you will see a city that's based on the building, and the building itself, which is of course its own entity. All are related to the actual structure of Alfred Lerner Hall, the place we are currently in, so it's a virtual space. |
Twenty-first-century aesthetics
So here we are in terms of twenty-first-century aesthetics, and urban culture is kind of the paradigmatic area for exploring the issues we have been talking about. I'm going to follow my DJ presentation by invoking four stories. I like the idea of stories--they convey a hypertextual imaginary rather than a pragmatic imaginary, a sense of pluralism. In hip-hop, they would call this a freestyle, when you just kind of riff on certain elements of your memory that you've already got locked down and memorized. |
In Ancient Greek society, they would just call it a Socratic method, where you are pulling back and forth. We have different forms of oral culture: Greek philosophy was taught in an oral context, and to me, electronic culture is bringing us back to a more current, alternating and direct paradoxical engagement with this notion of oralism or orality. We've already got one story, a discussion between me and Bernard about the building, which is now going to segue into: |
In 1922, one of my favorite inventors, Garrett A. Morgan, was walking down a street and saw an accident between a Model T Ford and a horse carriage. It was the aftermath of an accident--shattered vehicles, people's bodies cut up and blood everywhere--and it was a horrifying vision for him. |
At the time, Morgan was conducting a series of experiments on light and the control of electricity pulses. So he sees this accident, and he's in the middle of this experiment, and he realizes that we need to regulate movement in the streets. Otherwise there are going to be a lot more accidents, because there are a lot more cars coming into the urban landscape, and if people aren't looking and everybody is moving in different directions at the same time you will have the crash. |
We live in a post-J.G. Ballard moment. I don't know if everybody remembers the book Crash, but at the beginning of that novel Ballard said that sex times technology equals the future. It's one of my favorite equations. And so this notion of the crash invoking in an inventor the sense to try to engage the problem was a very good metaphor for this notion of different aesthetics in an American context. I like the idea of that story, the origin of the traffic light, which has been in our collective unconscious pretty much throughout most of the past century as a sense of regulated movement. |
My third story is about a guy named Georges Méliès, an early French filmmaker who was experimenting with different forms of perspective. You probably most know him for A Journey to the Moon, where the moon gets a little bullet in the eye--everyone was shooting rockets at the moon. But this is pre that period. You have to remember that people used to relate to films; if they saw a train coming out of a screen, they would run, because it was that visceral. |
But Méliès was filming a crowd moving in street traffic in Paris in 1896--a scene where he was having a crowd flee an omnibus coming out of a tunnel--when the camera jammed and he tried to fix it. But what he didn't realize is that the camera had a slight aperture opened. Then a hearse went by and the camera picked up the hearse, and when he finally fixed the camera and projected it, it looked like the omnibus was morphing into the hearse, and then back into the omnibus. |
So that was the first cut-narrative splice. Obviously, Méliès's use of cut narrative was the first time you had the narrowed permutation visually, when you really deal with splicing and dicing visual information. There's another filmmaker, D.W. Griffith, whose work I enjoy but for radically different reasons. |
D.W. Griffith made a film called The Birth of a Nation, which is considered a prototypical classic of the Hollywood blockbuster. It's a film based on the Civil War--the South was crushed by the North, and industrial culture slowly crept in. Griffith came up with the actual formal word for describing this style of visual intersplicing, and he called it "the cut." D.W. Griffith's critique of American culture was based on film; he is now known as the guy who invented Hollywood. |
Hyperturbulent environment
So here we are in the twenty-first century, after 100 years or so of dealing with all of these issues of industrial cultures, urbanism, a sense of extreme mass culture. At this point we are bombarded with "attention deficit disorder" kind of media, where you are always getting short sound bites and stuff--whether it's film, radio, whatever--jumping around. And that dispersion of attention has become a general mode of operation. So what to do when you have a generation of kids growing up on this? |
I'm in my twenties; we are probably the first generation of human beings to grow up in this kind of hypertextural environment, where everything is electronic and meant to be part of a whole media landscape. With this idea of learning and this notion of agora I was trying to critique the idea of how culture is transferred from generation to generation and how people create meaning in such a hyperturbulent and changing environment. |
That's why I enjoyed the idea of critiquing the Lerner Hall student center. It's fun; art should be fun. There's a classic essay by Hegel on aesthetics in which he said, "Art as we know it, its function is now over." And that was back in the nineteenth century, a long time ago. |
In his talk "On Pragmatist Aesthetics," Richard Shusterman brought up one of my favorite rappers, a guy named KRS-One. KRS-One came up with the term "edutainment"--education and entertainment. To me a lot of entertainment culture involves a sort of fetishism, where the performer is viewed as a locus point of values. Kids project onto him or her, and buy the performer's records, and it's kind of playing with the notion of sampling of people. It involves a sense of humor with what is going on. Culture itself is a playful sense of textual jouissance. |
I came out of school in the '90s, when deconstruction, multiculturalism and all these issues were raging through the academy. Some of the main American proponents of what they call "the closing of the American mind" would always invoke a European sense of classicism, which of course, if you look at European culture, is always based on hybridity. |
It was a fun time. I remember once I walked into philosophy class with a Public Enemy mixed tape. We were in a discussion of dialectics, and Public Enemy had a production group called the Bomb Squad (great name), and their records were all based on fragments. They'd take a James Brown solo and mix it with a teakettle being heated, and create a wild sort of sound, an energized track with someone rhyming. |
When you compare the difference between the aesthetics of European and West African cultures--the clash going on in the US--with that sense of fragmentation and flux, it's sort of a culture of erasure, where there is no sensible fixed ground to stand on. We are always shifting and changing. |
But at the same time that we exist in a sense of continuous erasure and reinscription, one of the central metaphors for me is the notion of the turntable. The persona DJ Spooky was meant to be a critique of disembodied culture, and with the turntable, when you think about it in a certain sense, you have recordings that can be played back at will and altered at will. |
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