Book
Rhythm Science
2004
Paul D. Miller
Typology category
designISBN-13
9780262632874
Publisher
MIT Press
Author
Paul D. Miller
Publication year
2004
Publisher's description
The art of the mix creates a new language of creativity. "Once you get into
the flow of things, you're always haunted by the way that things could have
turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The
uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that's what I'm going to
talk about."—Rhythm Science The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known
as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm
science—the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture,
"the changing same." Taking the Dj's mix as template, he describes how the
artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural
ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create
something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides
the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix,
doesn't stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the
artist's consciousness and the outside world. Miller constructed his Dj
Spooky persona ("spooky" from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient,
and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then
came to see it as the opportunity for "coding a generative syntax for new
languages of creativity." For example: "Start with the inspiration of
George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd
landscapes...What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere
sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or
density." Or, for an online "remix" of two works by Marcel Duchamp: "I took
a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his
visual material—with him rhyming!" Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science,
Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson ("all
minds quote"), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem.
"The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce," he writes. Miller's
textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction
by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans).
They sustain the book's motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts
and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5
dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut
hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding
in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories
from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial
Director Peter Lunenfeld's claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are
"theoretical fetish objects...'zines for grown-ups."
Experimental aspects:
Miller’s textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book’s motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to the Mediawork Pamphlets claim to be “theoretical fetish objects… ‘zines for grown-ups.”
Practices