Sinfonia Antarctica
CREDITS
PRESS
TOUR INFO
Spoleto, Italy
Spoleto 51 Festival dei due mondi
Teatrino delle Sei
10 -12 July 2008
Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne Arts Festival
Arts Center
16-19 October 2008
Milano, Italy
Teatro Manzoni
10 -12 July 2008
Lawrence, KS, USA
27 March 2009
Santa Barbara, CA (USA)
7 April 2009
Hanover, NH (USA)
15 April 2009
Poggibonsi, Italy
Fenice International Nine Arts Festival
Teatro Politeama
2 May 2009
New York (USA)
Next Wave Festival
BAM
2, 4 & 5 December 2009
St Polten, Austria
Festspielhaus
25 February 2010
Paris, France
Cite de la Musique
11May 2010
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
Multicidade Festival
30 November 2010
Terra Nova Sinfonia Antarctica is an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent and transforms the artist's first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. Field recordings from a portable studio set up to capture the acoustic qualities of ice forms, reflect a changing environment under duress. By way of record collections, musical taxonomies and play-lists Miller, deejay and author, maps his ongoing relationship with the past, present, and future of music. Blurring the lines between how composers create and artists design work in a seamless dialog between "sampling" and originality and calling into question the value of appropriation and the status of the copy is impetus for his portraits and cultural critiques.
Art has always had a prominent place in the exploration of Antarctica. Until the mid-20th century, it was common for explorers of the Polar Regions to be accompanied by artists to visually record the sights and phenomena for research and popular distribution. DJ Spooky brings Antarctica to the contemporary imagination by digitally reconstructing it: historical maps, travelers' journals over the last several centuries, crystalline ice's resonant frequencies, and the Earth's magnet poles are the paints for the audio palette he has worked with.
Terra Nova is a beautiful performance that creates a unique and powerful moment around man's relationship with nature. In the performance DJ Spooky's electronic score is enhanced also by the live performance of Alter Ego Trio (piano, cello and violin). This project confirms DJ Spooky as one of the most prominent American artists of a new generation engaging socially and politically, as he recently showed in his exhibit Regime Change Starts at Home at the Galleria Irvine Contemporary of Washington, where his artwork is shown next to Shepard Fairey, known for the portrait of Barack Obama Hope published on the covers of magazines worldwide.
"The whole vibe is getting people to think about the planet itself as a record or a document that is always changing. Music is a reflection of that, sampling is a reflection of that, and most of all, I want people to think of the environment as something that we interact with in a pretty deep way." (Paul D. Miller). Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in New York. Miller's work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts, has recorded a huge volume of music and has collaborated with a wide variety of artists and musicians.
credits
TERRA NOVA Sinfonia Antarctica
conceived, composed, performed by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Visual Design A.J. Weissbard
Images research & Video Editing V-Factory / Andrea Bianchi, Matteo Massocco
Commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dartmouth College, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Spoleto 51 Festival dei due mondi
Project and Artistic coordination Change Performing Arts
with Music+Art Management, USA
producer Stephen Cohen
executive production CRT Artificio
Acknowledgments Rosemary Reed Miller, Howard Kenty, Greg Lucas, Sven Furberg, Arminio Sciolli, MIT Pressi
conceived, composed, performed by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Visual Design A.J. Weissbard
Images research & Video Editing V-Factory / Andrea Bianchi, Matteo Massocco
Commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dartmouth College, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Spoleto 51 Festival dei due mondi
Project and Artistic coordination Change Performing Arts
with Music+Art Management, USA
producer Stephen Cohen
executive production CRT Artificio
Acknowledgments Rosemary Reed Miller, Howard Kenty, Greg Lucas, Sven Furberg, Arminio Sciolli, MIT Pressi