Ooh... Spooky!

Miller's text is dense in the same way the listenings on the CD are dense... and in this way, I think, pose the same risk that we will designate those elements that signify for us with the properties of "voice," allowing the others to be relegated to the role of "noise."  It is with this in mind, and with an awareness that what has signified for me may not be at all the entirety of what Miller intended for me to hear, that I pose these questions.

 

1.  Miller writes, "The basic idea is to use the digital to try and make a bridge between the interior and exterior... (W)e are able to send our visions and ideas in ways our ancestors would have thought were god-like (16)."  Given this concept of Dj culture as that which allows interiority to become shared, public experience, I am surprised at Miller's continued insistence through out the book on the ideas of creativity and of some persons, but not all persons, as artists.  These words, which are heavily laden with their history of allowing for criticism--for the determining of "good" and "bad" art--seem to me to be in opposition to the idea of the interior exposed.  Are we really meant then, in what Miller calls the "current" age, to judge one another's interiority?  Does the act of participating in the cultural move toward these "shared hallucinations" require us, then, to begin to craft an alterity that has artistic merit?  This seems to me to open the door to a very dangerous kind of elitism in which critics become the gatekeepers, monitoring who may join in the "shared hallucination" and who must simply continue to stand outside of it as a consumer.

 

2.  Miller writes, "To name, to call, to upload, to download... So I'm sitting here and writing -- creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed geographic regions --- reflect and reflecting on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapdily moving into what I like to call prosthetic realism.  site and sound, sign and signification:  The travel at this point becomes mental... it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the art piece (85)."  It seems to me that much of Rhythm Science is an act of prognostication, and attempt to guess at the impact of borderless information, as much as it is a work of description or a manifesto.  Rhythm Science brings to mind other mixtures of the digital and the musical... Jaron Lanier's interactive dance floors and walls (which never really worked when they were at Click and Drag in New York, but which maybe actually work now), Laurie Anderson's Big Science (which has always worked), and even the eery sound of the Theremin.  With the exception of Anderson's ground breaking music, the other two experiments never got much past being cultural curiosities.  

 

While it seems undeniable that everything will change, and that digitization will be part of that change, I’m unpersuaded the Dj culture is a catalyst of that change instead of simply an artifact of it.  I am unsure exactly where Miller posits the enduring value of Dj culture, or of how this culture avoids becoming so endlessly self-referential—as future generations have nothing to sample but the already-sampled, reforming it through their own lenses, but still stuck with the source material?