Jason J. Crawford

Last night I saw DJ Spooky perform his latest work Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica at UCSB’s Campbell Hall.  It was so inspiring that I had to get behind the keyboard.  I’m also writing this because I would have loved to have spoke at length with Paul (aka DJ Spooky) about his meditation but I didn’t want to be “that person” who ends up monopolizing all the time talking while others are waiting in line.

When I first found out that DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) had begun working on an “Antarctic suite” last year, my real question was why?  My cynicism made me think it would be a “hip-hopera” set to March of the Penguins where it explored an appropriation of the Antarctic visual landscape that has come to prominence through the recent strain of penguin movies.  Instead what I saw was something absolutely genius and something I think is Miller’s best work yet.

It is the first time I have seen a meditation or any media about Antarctica from a position that underscored the universal and plural function of the region.  Excluding assigned territories from the original treaty, Antarctica contains the world’s largest common-space of land.  It was meant to symbolize the dawning of an international age with the function to promote world peace and cooperation rather than be subject to the conflict of a power grab by colonizers.  This was similar to the way Al Gore described the famous Earth Rise photo in An Inconvenient Truth and how that functioned to promote global unity.  Miller also made this point apparent in one sequence when flags of the world shuffled over and over across the screen in what conveyed a very cohesive composition between countries being interlocked in a way of forming a global quilt of nations that were conjoined by Antarctica.

I left feeling that the commons were a step forward with promoting international solidarity.  However not everyone felt this way.  Walking out of the theater, it was surprising to overhear so many jeers by the audience who either didn’t know what to make of it or as one lady described it as “boring and self-indulgent.”  It’s unfortunate there wasn’t a discussion afterwards because I believe it would have cleared up a lot of misconceptions and allowed for this meditation to create a public discourse from it.  In the lobby I heard another couple comment how repetitive the opening portion was.  I felt like inserting myself into their conversation but I was waiting in a line.  However on this point about repetition and extended time duration, I think it came at a fitting point during the “arrival” as we experienced what Werner Herzog also noted during the flight into Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World.  In the film, Herzog commented about this sense of time vanishing as if you are crossing into this parallel realm.  The sort of experience you would see in science fiction when someone travels through a  portal or the “flying house” experience in Wizard of Oz.  In this regard I believe Miller has structured this film in an autobiographical experience that mirrors his own entrance into Antarctica, positioning us as the viewer to experience what he must have felt crossing over into Antarctica.  After you have been sucked in down the rabbit hole to this other world of Antarctica, Miller draws on the initial experiences one would likely feel.  A bedazzlement of the sublime, the feeling of a natural vastness that allows you to begin examining the intricacies of the landscape.  You begin to hear the ice, sense the rawness of the barren environment in Antarctica.

From this point Miller then takes us through the troubles of this landscape by presenting data that makes the viewer conscious to the threat that global warming has on this landscape.  This portion reminded of Len Lye’s work with certain visual matches and object movements across screen.  The data he presents has a graphical function to be didactic as opposed to just merely be read like one would get their information from the New York Times. It’s a feeling like you are climbing up the mountain of a bar chart displaying anthropogenic C02 levels of the last 150 years which has a more nauseating feeling than merely reading about it in print.  However this is where one reservation about the piece could be made.  Why not present such data or factoids plainly?  It’s true, you don’t get a lot of information but as a meditation piece I don’t believe one should be looking at Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica to be providing you with the educational basis about climate change.

After the show I got to speak with Miller briefly.  I asked whether this work was a concious extension of his previous work of remix culture that is an direction of the commons that we can understand about Antartica.  He smiled and noded, seemingly delighted that I recognized the commons function of the piece.  He also mentioned that going into the process it was something that be built upon once he visited Antartica, as opposed to going there specifically looking for things he already wanted to convey.  This is another factor that has lead me to believe Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica was a very personal and spiritual piece for Miller, something that is very much memorialized with the experience of going there.  I also believe this may attribute to why it is performed differently from time to time, something ad libbed by memory of his experiences as it brought together the way you may reflect on a journey in life differently depending on what mental photographs you recall from it.