By Claire Dietz
Paul Miller — more widely known by his stage name, DJ Spooky — is a self-proclaimed nerd. With a wide variety of hobbies and interests, he creates experimental music projects that are unlike anything else being produced by his peers. Now, however, he wants to take that idiosyncrasy a level further by pulling into conversation with two entirely disparate fields: electronic music and astrophysics.
Miller will give a talk as part of the Creative Matters Lecture Series at 5:30 p.m. today in 240 Art Building West. There, he will discuss his creative process as well as premiere a short excerpt from a new work commissioned by the University of Iowa. The project, created in collaboration with the UI’s video team, is based on recordings made on the groundbreaking Explorer I mission that led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in 1958.
Miller was always interested in diplomacy growing up and had no idea his DJing hobby would become his full-time profession. While to this day, most of his DJ friends desire to become famous and hit the top-40 charts, Miller has other goals.
“I prefer to keep it fun and experimental, because I’m a nerd,” Miller said. “I don’t really care about what’s trendy or whatever; I care about what’s interesting. You’d be surprised, they’re very different usually.”
Miller has a wide range of interests, including foreign politics, climate change, and, of course, experimental music. He said he uses his art in order to explore the world around him, seeing information as a tool he intends to take advantage of as best he can.
“I feel like it’s a way of asking questions that are difficult to answer,” Miller said. “The more difficult they are, the better. Music is that questioning process for me.”
Now, that questioning process has led him to yet another couple of subjects to include in his work: astronomy and James Van Allen.
Van Allen was head of the University of Iowa Physics/Astronomy Department for more than 30 years and was instrumental in launching the Explorer I satellite that went on to discover the Earth-orbiting radiation belts now bearing his name.
Many of Van Allen’s notebooks, papers, and tapes had been buried in the archives of the UI Libraries until they were found several years ago and subsequently digitized. Among the collection were a series of recordings — audio and visual — made aboard the famous 1958 satellite mission.
But fresh off the heels of this discovery, the library encountered a problem: Now that it had all of this material, what was it supposed to do with it?
Tom Keegan, the head of the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, had an idea.
“We were thinking [about] this expansive nature of the collection,” he said. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be interesting to an artist for remixing, remediating, and combining the scientific narrative data with artistry.’ ”
Here is where Miller, the self-proclaimed nerd and professional remixer, enters the story.
Miller said he will walk the audience at his lecture today through some of his creative processes before premièring part of the piece the libraries have commissioned. The work will début in its entirety in a special event at the Mission Creek Festival next year.
A fundamental aspect of Miller’s artistic process is sampling and appropriating many pieces of different music genres — and other art forms — in his work. For this reason, to Miller, the seemingly unconventional placement of space sounds on the DJ’s preset pad didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary.
“I pick and pull apart other aspects of music,” he said. “That’s the way we look at the world. We’re a multicultural society; I think we live and breathe collage.”