Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>> Hello. Welcome. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to Google tonight for the first
talk in conjunction with the third exhibition in our series of "Digital Art at Google".
I'm standing in tonight for Josh Mittleman who should have been here tonight but had
a building emergency at home so he had to go home. Josh is an engineer here at Google
who set up this "Digital Art at Google" program to explore and to encourage collaboration
between Google and digital artists. So Google's mission is to organize the world's information
and make it universally acceptable and useful and art can be seen as one way to organize
and access information. And after Google moved its New York office to Chelsea, Josh looked
at how Google could reach out to the local art scene to foster creativity, interaction,
and innovation. So Josh got in contact with Nina Colosi who is here tonight and who curates
The Project Room for New Media and the Streaming Museum. I invited her to curate this series
of art exhibitions in the Google offices. This is the third exhibition that we've had
here this year. So the current exhibition is "Ancient Stories with Modern Technology"
and we're honored tonight to have one of the show's artist, Paul Miller, also known as
DJ Spooky. So Paul Miller is a multitalented artist whose resume I can't possibly do justice
to. As a media artist he has exhibited all over the world including the Whitney Biennial,
the Vienna Kunsthalle, and the Venice Architecture Biennial, and a solo show at Paula Cooper
Gallery in New York. He's written in many periodicals including Artforum, the Village
Voice, and Paper Magazine. He has published "Rhythm Science", a collection of essays,
and "Sound Unbound" an anthology of essays on sound art and multimedia. But he is perhaps
best known for his constructive DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid and has recorded extensively
and collaborated with all manner of musicians and composers from Pierre Boulez to Yoko Ono.
In this show here at Google, Paul presents an installation of works inspired by his vision
for the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation; an endless initiative he's asking "Can 21st century technology
supply, support traditional ecological knowledge in ways that enrich village life and contemporary
art?" So as one of the artists in this exhibition and the organizer of the artist talks in the
exhibition series, it's my great pleasure to introduce Paul Miller. Thank you.
[applause]
Paul Miller >> First and foremost, I just want to say thank you so much for coming out
tonight and I realize it's always something to create time in New
York. I mean in fact that's one of the issues that was an inspiration for the Vanuatu project,
this idea of free time. So what I want to do today is walk you
all through some of the issues that are kind of resonant with what I'm thinking about with
not only contemporary art but looking at digital media's
relationship to what we at the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation like to call "traditional ecological
knowledge" (TEK). So one of the things that I'm really
thinking about right now as an artist is okay, in the 21st century how digital media; you
have this idea of a information based economy and above all you
have this notion that things are becoming more and more dematerialized, immaterial and
kind of invisible processes guide most aspects of the economy, they
guide most aspects of how we think of this notion of the archive that kind of guides
and gives people structure in terms of everything from language to
digital media to how your jet planes are flown and so on. So one thing that really, how should
I put this? Like is a core issue for me as an artist is this
idea that geography is becoming more and more abstract so to ground myself as an artist
many of my projects take place in very remote places which lead me to
this idea of Vanuatu and not only looking at Vanuatu as a specific geographic place
but as an idea. So what I want to do today is unpack some of the issues that
are guiding the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation and the Tanna Center for the Arts. But I also
want to sort of unpack some of the issues that go through my mind
when I'm think about contemporary art in the digital economy and looking at this idea of
oceanic art and it's relationship to how we look at different forms of
cultural production. So behind me you have a typical example of architecture from the
Vanuatu region. These are kind of large scale social structures. The
architecture is built usually by hand and above all a lot of the material comes from
the region. It's very specific to the area and you have this idea of a
kind of sustainable use of materials in the region. So bamboo, wood, some forms of steel
but most of the material is handmade in a way that reflects local
economy, local purposes and so as an artist that kind of intrigues me in a way because
how do you think, you know, if I need some air, I go down to Pearl
Paint on Canal Street or something like that. If you are in the middle of a jungle in the
middle of kind of a different region of the world, where are your
materials going to come from but the place that most people would go to, the natural
state of things around you. So at the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation, what
I want to do is say here we have one foot in this hyper urbanized, media saturated landscape
of modern America, modern Europe, modern Asia, and modern Latin
America and Africa, and so on but we also have one foot in this realm that's kind of
a place of suspended time and Tanna is one of 83 islands and we're going
to be setting up the Tanna Center for Arts on this island. So what I want to do is walk
you through some of things that drove me to Vanuatu or took me to
Vanuatu. Last year I did a project called Nauru Elegies with a Korean architect named
Annie K. Kwon. It was a project that was meant to look a virtual
economies and it's a intriguing place, Nauru. It's a place with a totally shattered economy.
It's a tiny island further north then Vanuatu and in the early
90's as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a group of Russian bankers in what they now
call oligarchs became very clever and very nimble at shifting around billions
and billions of dollars out of Russia. And the Ministry of Finances being looted and
as the Soviet Union was collapsing, hundreds of billions of dollars
started to vanish out of Russia and all of the sudden appear on this small island in
the middle of the South Pacific. So the Russians were very clever at
bypassing the normal codes of conduct that banks had to have in Switzerland or Monaco
or Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands or the Isle of Man and most of those
are what we call tax havens. So the idea of a tax haven or data haven in our era is a
place that's slightly off the grid. So Nauru, for me, became a very
compelling place to think about global finance and I wanted to do this project based on its
notion of global finance and the virtualization of banking, which
if you think about it, your credit card status and your social security number, even if of
course we're here at Google, the digitization of the landscape
that goes into GPS maps, all of that means that the data self, the second self that theoreticians
like Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker like to call them
C Theory, the second self. Your data, you know, the things that define you to the various
digital media that we need to interact with. These kinds of places
are kind of black holes in the landscape so Nauru, you have to imagine people being assassinated
in the streets of Moscow, bankers kind of running around. The
paper economy was old school at that point in the early 90's as the Soviet Union collapsed
like I said earlier; hundreds of billions of dollars vanishes and
appears in this small island. So as this kept happening, as the Soviet Union was in a slow
motion collapse before Boris Yeltsin and so on. What ends up
happening is Nauru also achieved a kind of per capita development situation because of
the rise of phosphate prices. Now, this island is made of millions of
years of bird guano, bird *** and in the middle of the South Pacific it's an agricultural
wasteland now because it's been mined to the core and the whole
island has been stripped bare. So the Russians on one hand had virtual banking, and then
other colonial powers like Australia and Britain and so on had stripped
the island. So when I arrived last year the island was this eerie moonscape and what was
going on is that the Russians had funneled their money through and
reappeared in places like UBS in Switzerland or the Bank of New York in New York. To this
day, people are still being arrested by stuff that happened in
Nauru. So the New York Times ran a really wild article called "The Billion Dollar Shack"
and I'll just pull it up really quick for you just to give you a
little background on the
[pause]
and what ends up going on in this, oops, let's go back. What ends up happening in this kind
of island situation is that at
one point there became more corporations on the island then there were people, and what's
really fascinating with that to me as an artist is that
corporations are considered people but what happens with this notion of virtual banking
is that all you need is an address and if you're looking at Enron, if
you're looking at the banking crisis of 2008, people play with geography, they play with
how many represents certain kind of value. But to me what's
interesting is that money isn't really a reflection of value per se. It's about the notions of
social use of materials and when I say materials we're looking
at electronic and digital media materials. So, alright, you're in the middle of the South
Pacific and you show up on this island where all these corporations
that were virtual financial institutions, what they call shell corporations, had been
made. And also you're realizing that the island is stunningly poor and
that the place is completely strip mined and bare. And so it's a desert in the middle of
this beautiful region of the South Pacific because of the collision of
the physical infrastructure of the mining versus the virtual banking that happened from
Moscow straight through. So there's this one place on the island
where there was a server that the Russians used to funnel all the money through and Nauru
started popping up in all these kind of science fiction books by
people like William Gibson, people like Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson because a lot
of the science fiction had heard about this island as this bizarre
economic black hole in the global system. So it became a place where like gangster bankers
would park their money and then it would disappear, or if you were a
major arms dealer and you needed to funnel a couple of billion dollars to like a warlord
in Angola, you know, the money would go through Nauru. And right now
in fact, because of the Iraq war and I'm going to get back on topic in a second about Vanuatu
but because of the Iraq War for example you can get a Nauru
passport because most of the industrialized nations have signed what they called anti-mercenary
laws so if you need to get a citizenship of a virtual place
you get a Nauru passport, you then reapply to Blackwater Security, and the next thing
you know you're in Iraq so there you go. So this is an ongoing idea of
a virtual economy and one of the funny things about money is it's like energy, it never
really vanishes, it goes someplace. So in 2008 when a lot of the US's
money sort of went up in smoke because of all of the derivatives markets, futures markets,
what they call CDO, credit default swaps, all this kind of virtual
finance and the Russians had already experienced something quirkily similar to that in the
beginning of the 90's with the fall of the Soviet banking system.
So, to make a long story short, I'm an artist, I'm a writer, I'm somewhat interested in music
not just music but music as information. It's something that
reflects social values through the prism of digital media. So the reason I'm having this
idea of a billion dollar shack in the middle of the island in the
South Pacific is that this became an ideal of dystopia. So let me just show you some
of the ruins of the phosphate corporations. All of the island is
collapsing right now. It's kind of got all these kind of warning signs, all the buildings
are in slow motion collapse, it looks like a nuclear bomb has gone
off and eerily enough, all of the structures are just rusted and collapsing and the notion
of global finance that drove the phosphate mining and also drove, on the other hand,
the virtual economy, all of that has departed from the island kind of like locusts or something
that just came in and took over, put up
all these structures and buildings, and then just vanished. So that's why people like William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the cyber punk writers, are very
interested in it. So Annie K. Kwon's architecture reflected this idea of what she called Hypsographic
Architecture and if you couldn't find a better metaphor
for globalization right now. The island is actually sinking as well so
[chuckle]
you have a collapsed economy, a strip mine place that's been made into an
eerie ghost island and at the same time the waters are rising so I was like hey, as an
artist, this is a wild place. Let's go, let's go to Nauru. So Vanuatu
represents another extreme which is very much considered what they call a utopian model.
So what I want to do before I get into utopias is to think about
this idea of what I like to call the "gift economy". So to invoke that what I'd like
to do is give away a whole bunch of music. Can I ask if you can just
take some of these and pass them to other people? Alright. So take one and pass it along
and if there's not enough, there's plenty of CD's I brought with me.
I'll leave some up here just in case. If you are in the back and you don't get one, there's
plenty here. So what I want to do is invoke this notion of what
the anthropologist Marcel Mauss liked to call the "gift economy" because he was studying
American Indians and looking at how certain cultures came up with
what they call potlatch and that was the opposite of the normal capitalist model of scarcity.
In fact, you're supposed to achieve social status and achieve
this idea of parody with your peers by giving away things. So the more you gave in certain
societies and cultures, the more you achieve social status. So the
network economy is a similar thing. If you're a blogger, if you're someone who accumulates
information, you achieve social status by creating a value of
information. A very nuanced and very ambiguous and very interesting way of thinking about
reconstituting value in a digital economy. So the "gift economy"
overlaps with the net. Now I hope I'm not losing you all in this but I'm thinking much
more about this idea of the network effect which sometimes - say for
example one website comes along and just all of the sudden becomes viral and so big very
quickly. That's what economists like to call a network effect.
In the arts, say for example Andy Warhol's brand, created value much more then any specific
practice because he was branded figure and the more people heard
about the work, the more it accumulated value so the same thing happened with Facebook or
Google or any of these kind of things. You're looking at an overlap
of social systems then becoming quantized and being able to have metrics to measure
that value and it's about the buzz of something. So Nauru versus Vanuatu;
utopia versus dystopia; the idea of how we navigate network systems socially. So in our
culture in the US, we are now really, really, really everyone is
obsessed with social networks right now but in other cultures we are actually kind of
catching up to them; a small village where everyone knows everyone and
has certain forms of trade and communication; a different way of thinking about the idea
of how you accumulate value and social prestige; these are things
that I was thinking about when I arrived in Vanuatu. So me and Annie left Nauru, went
to Australia, hung out in Australia for a moment, and then went to
Vanuatu. Vanuatu was meant to be the opposite of Nauru. So when you see this ghost island
that's got, it's been strip mined. You can see it's almost like a
cancer cell that's spread through the island and stripped away all the value and then you
see all those structures collapsing. Let's got to Vanuatu and see
something very different. So what I want to do before I show you more images is invoke
another situation which is the idea of the "mix". I've been working
with Apple and Musicsoft Arts and I have the DJ Spooky iPhone app and iPad app, and with
Musicsoft Arts we've had over 2 million downloads of the app and
it's been one of Apple's top downloads, the deejay mixer project. So we gave away the
app, again invoking this notion of the "gift economy", and what it does
is it turns your iPhone or your laptop or you know touch screen into a digital mixing
platform; hopefully you can see all this; and the idea is that you don't
have an active relationship to your playlist right now. If you have iTunes, what the phone
or the iPad does is it integrates to your iTunes library and it
essentially makes you be able to have a deejay mix platform where you're applying the idea
of an analog logic of the mix. I don't know if you can see these
turntables. The turntables become kind of data streams and you can easily mix, loop,
and layer and again the loop function is really interesting because in that way you
can break up all the songs in your iTunes library as you pull them into your phone or
as you pull them into your iPad. So I'll just show a quick example.
This is going to be about this idea of the "mix" versus again that "gift economy", giving
away things for free. So here we have a free iPhone app that's
achieved about 2 million downloads and we're thinking about that in the middle of the South
Pacific, right? So what it does is it integrates your iTunes
library, pulls in beats and elements, it does beat analysis on them and then assigns them
to different mix channels so I'll just show you that really quick.
You can see what I'm seeing and I'm going to do the same thing so I'm just going to
do this very quick demo. The idea of music as a social construct, music
as a kind of a social currency so here we go.
[electrical music start playing]
So you get the idea. It's exactly like turntable so the whole fun part about
that is that we wanted to have an intuitive platform that let people apply the idea of
deejay technique to digital media, being able to mix, layer, loop, and
transform a song is something that's part of the basic vocabulary of electronic music
right now. And globally speaking if you go to Brazil, China, Russia,
India, most of the developing economies are based on bootleg economies right now. People
are literally looking at this idea that value comes from sharing and
it's not in a corporate kind of context. I know I'm saying this here at Google so I'm
sorry about that but bootleg Google, it's already free, right? So the
fun part about thinking about the South Pacific was the idea of values here and I had read
several books, one was Aldous Huxley's "The Island. It's a great,
it's his last novel and it was his antidote to "Brave New World" and I'm sure most of
you have heard "Brave New World" but very few people have read "The
Island". He wanted to try and think about a literary antidote to what he was seeing
with "Brave New World". This idea of a highly medicated society where no
one has time, everyone is in a highly regulated and very stratified culture and "The Island"
was meant to be the antidote for what he had seen in his own
vision of the near future. "Brave New World" is one of my favorite books. "The Island"
as a counterpoint is one of my other favorites. So what I want to do
is play you a quick, amusing, bizarre DVD of a TV show called "Meet the Natives" and
it's set in Vanuatu and it's actually set in Tanna as well. So what
you're going to see here is super appalling and it's like "The Birth of A Nation" or something.
I mean, it's a really wild film. So what you're going to see
is there's one of the tribes in the island has what they call a cargo cult and Tanna
is the center of cargo cults for the region and I'm going to walk you
through this but I want to play you the video first then I'll walk you through it. So what
you're going to see is this one specific cult that believes that
Prince Philip is a god and during World War II a lot of American troops were stationed
in Vanuatu and some were British. Vanuatu is a former British colony; so
in Nauru well, Nauru is an Australian protectorate now to an extent. Although it's a democracy
and supposedly independent, they have a deep economic
relationship with Australia. So, to make a long story short, colonies; colonial issues,
looking at the idea of how World War II transformed the region; the
Japanese have occupied certain islands and executed thousands of people, then the British
and the Americans set up military bases. They had huge airlift,
cargo, and you know, stuff going on so the indigenous people saw huge B-2 bombers and
stuff like that flying in and they saw them drop cargo for the troops.
So after a certain point they felt that these were huge silver birds in the sky were kind
of divine kind of entities dropping off material for the American
troops. So believe it or not on Tanna there's a cult called John Frum which is they believe
an African-American soldier is going to come back to the island
if they set up enough rituals and enough drum chants to free the islands from some kind
of form of oppression. On the other hand, you have this cult that
believes Prince Philip is a god so certain ideas around how an airfield for example,
I'm just going to give you one example and then I'm going to play
this, they would make an airfield and put bamboo airplanes in the middle of the airfield
to attract the other silver birds to come down.
[laughs] Imagine stuff like that. Imagine if you, for the first time, had ever seen
a huge B-2 bomber come and drop huge cargo with parachutes. That must have been super
wild.
So to this day the John Frum cult exists. It in fact has members in Parliament in Vanuatu
and the other cults, these are cults in the same way the early
Greek philosophy was cults. You think about Plato or Socrates and so on. So let me play
you this clip and it is eerily bizarre but I'm going to then
contextualize it so here we go.
[guitar music in video begins playing]
>>Male narrator: Welcome to our tropical island. It's called Tanna, in the middle of the South
[waterfall sound] Every so often, we get visited by white men with cameras
[rooster crows]
who come to film our traditional villages. They are always interested in what we
wear, how we cook, and the things we like to eat. But one group was different. They
invited five of us to visit their country and to live with three of their
native tribes. This is our story of the time when our great Chief Yalpa, a great chief;
Chol, our finest doctor; Josen an expert pig farmer; Albie our greatest counselor; and
me, Timotousen, who is talking to you now went to the other side of the planet to make
a film about the strange and exotic land named England.
[gunshot]
[sounds of pigs squeeling]
>>Female: Do you ever eat your pets?
[chanting and yells] >>Narrator: It was an amazing traveling adventure
as we explored many different aspects of their
foreign culture.
[club music playing]
[dogs barking and hunt horn sounded]
Including their traditional songs.
[chants]
Their typical foods.
>>Female: Ketchup or brown sauce?
>>Narrator: And their national customs.
>>Male: If you have a pin on bow tie normally you try and make it a bit different to look
like you've tied it yourself.
[laughs]
[guitar music playing in background and movie ends]
>>DJ Spooky: So this TV show was called "Meet the Natives" and it was a popular TV show
series in England. In the US, I'm sure it
would have caused an uproar. So what they did was bring this particular cult that worships
Prince Philip to meet Prince Philip in Windsor and
[laughs]
and they had them go through English society and check out all so they viewed English as
natives and then the English so these guys became kind of amateur
anthropologists. I don't know if you can see the resolution; they all have cameras and
they're meant to come to England to document that native rituals of
the tribal people called the English. So they're on the other side of the island and we're
on Tanna and I'd heard about this film so I was really intrigued
by thinking about the idea of again a contemporary art center in the middle of all this swirling,
strange, kind of very interesting bubbling of not only
"The Island" is the embodiment of one of my favorite science fiction writers phrases.
William Gibson has a great phrase where he says, "The future is already
here. It's just unevenly distributed." And you can see these guys dressed in traditional
gear in the middle of these skyscrapers in, you know, downtown
London and that is the embodiment of this kind of collage aesthetic. You have all of
these different versions of how people have the ideological frameworks of
how they organize information and you have this social network that value and embody
these kinds of values but above all you have different forms of
technology, social technologies that people use to construct their sense of aesthetics.
So as an artist, writer, and musician I deejay all over the world and
I've deejayed in places as remote as Antarctica and I've just got back from the North Pole
come to think of it. I've also deejayed in war zones like Sudan.
I've been to crazy war zones like Moscow too, you know?
[laughs]
In fact one time I had a show at the Hotel National in Moscow and the owner had been
blackmailing the mayor of Moscow which you never want to do and there was a huge explosion
mark in front of the hotel and I was like, "What happened to the
owner" or "Why is this here?" and my driver was like, "Hotel owner is dead." So you know
Russia is kind of Wild West. It's definitely a fun spot. So I've
seen a lot and been in a lot of radically different continents but the glue that holds
all this together is digital media. I'm a music producer and I'm an
artist that looks at digital media as a kind of dematerialized tool. So what I want to
do tonight is when you see this "Meet The Natives", to me it's
appalling, it's bizarre, it's paradoxical much in the same way the D.W. Griffith's "Birth
of a Nation" had white people in blackface kind of representing
this notion of you know, I'm sure the Tea Party is probably watching it now, right?
But when you think about digital media, globalization, and all these
issues that face artists in any context anywhere on the planet. Vanuatu and Tanna specifically
is a very unique places because it has this utopian vision of
something that's a very pristine and beautiful and remote place. It kind of has this at the
edge of the known world feel to it and that's why I went since
timelessness, sense of being out of the media kind of maelstrom, and hitting the reset button
on the idea of creativity. So I took a studio with me and I
went to several of the main villages and I ended up hanging out and I noticed they loved
radio, and there was only a couple kind of places on the island
where people could really hang out and listen to music in a large show context. So my girlfriend
Annie, or ex-girlfriend, walked around and it was interesting
because we kept being looked at. We were very different and Annie is Korean and I'm African-American
and us walking around was just kind of novelty for the
indigenous people. They are like "Who are these guys?" because usually the quote on
quote "tourists" that come to Tanna are there to see this volcano. They
come in for a day and it's usually some beefy people from Australia who sit and lounge and
drink at this one resort on the island and then leave. So they
don't interact, they don't hang out, they just come see this crazy volcano and leave.
So me and Annie ended up hanging out there. We were planning on staying
there for one week and we ended up staying for four weeks. I went swimming every day
and had fresh fish every day. I loved walking and I walked around. So
what I want to do is contextualize this, not only from the view point of why as an artist
I fell in love with this beautiful region but thinking about in an arts
context. Now, there's a couple of other artists that are doing really interesting kind of
projects about environmental issues and so on and one is a project
that Rirkrit Tiravanija is doing and that's called the Land Project. This is in Thailand
and what he's doing is reclaiming a series of fields and setting up
a series of art projects around rice and exchange and everyone who participates in the project
gets their share of rice of what they put in. So it's very
specific to thinking about environmental issues and indigenous populations but it's done by
Thai artists in Thailand. So although Rirkrit lives in New York,
the project is initiated by someone is indigenous to that culture. Now what we're going to be
doing with the Tanna Center for the Arts is a kind of exchange
mechanism. It's going to be a forum for saying, "Hey, wait a second. Let's think about this
from the viewpoint of we have something to learn from these
people". Now there's this group of economists that have come up with what they call the
New Economic forum or foundation and Vanuatu has been consistently,
over the last several years, although it's not this year because they had a whole recreatement
of criteria of judgment and the economics of what make it
happy. So what I'm talking about now is production values, social networks, and stuff like that.
The New Economic Foundation set up this system for measuring
happiness. Now, Vanuatu, whenever you think about this idea of the native, remember I
was showing you earlier "Meet The Natives" and the smiling guys from
Tanna and they're meant to be happy and relaxed and primitive in the middle of like this complex,
crazy society called the English or England. So the West
always like to think about this idea of the national state of the other. You know, if
you look at "Heart of Darkness" or if you look at certain other books
in the literature of colonialism, going native and hanging out with the indigenous people,
guess what, it's still with us. Look at the movie "Avatar", right?
The white guy from the complex society goes to this beautiful tropical planet and becomes
blue and all of the sudden he likes, "Hey, forget the corporation.
I'm going to lead the native people to rebel", right? It's exactly like Tarzan and so on.
We've seen this one before. So when you think about "Avatar" and
the idea of going native and so on, the other, if you look at the history of philosophy and
again philosophy of technology here. Rousseau, Voltaire, you know?
There's lot of theoreticians that thought about indigenous people as the pure ones.
The ones who somehow avoided the complex corruption of our crazy
technological advanced society. So I'm intrigued with turning that upside down and saying,
"Wait a second. What would happen if we said this is a complex
society?" They have problems of their own. They have a whole situation where we're coming
in as aliens, you know? But the fun part about it for me as an
artist was that music was the glue. So when I ended up meeting some of the people from
the island which is you know people were staring, they were curious.
They saw an African-American guy and a Korean woman walking around. First and foremost,
the foreigners never walk. They always are usually in a car and me
and Annie walking around and actually swimming. Nobody was swimming even though there were
these beautiful, stunningly beautiful coral reefs. Me and her would
swim for hours and hours and they were like, "Who are these foreigners that actually like
to swim", you know? It was, I mean, you'd walked down a stunningly
beautiful beach for hours and not bump into another person which for me is great being
from New York, right? Try doing that on the E Train or something else.
There's always too many people all the time. So when I think about the complexity of an
artist leaving New York and going to this beautiful island, it's not
about Aldous Huxley. It's not about Rousseau and the idea of that natural state of natural
man. What I'm saying is that these are complex societies that I
have to figure out if I'm going to be participating in any way, shape, or form in our own culture.
It's a mirror, you know? Sometimes one of my favorite
writers is a gentleman by the name of Pico Iyer. He writes about the philosophy of travel.
And as a deejay whose deejayed all over the world and again, in a
digital media context, I'm really intrigued at that. So right now I'm at this point where
I feel like the cities that we've built are, they are poorly
structured for our modern life. Most American cities are based on the grid. The logic of
the grid conditions and contextualizes our sense of space and time.
If you look at Detriot from above to Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., the American logic
of the grid has made us have a sense of compression and if you
think about the electronic music that comes out of the grid, this is something I'm very
intrigued with as well. It's like this notion of the orthogonal logic
of our time. I'll show a quick example. I'm working on my next couple of projects based
on Stephen Wolfram who is a really renowned mathematician. He has this
book called "Mathematica" that does analysis of natural forms as algorithmic states. So
say for example, I'll give you one example because I know this
conversation would feel like Vanuatu, Nauru, economics, happiness, crazy New York, you
know? So I'm trying to think of it as a collage lecture. So what
you're seeing behind me are various natural forms that have a very mathematical, very
algorithmic kind of context. Say the most obvious example is this
snowflake, right? You see a snowflake. They are hexagon and there's a mathematical equation
that a gentleman by the name of Johannes Kepler who was a really
renowned physicist from the 16th or 17th century, 1642 I believe or something like that. So
every snowflake is unique because it's precisely the condition and
context that make it slightly different but there's a rule based structure under it. So
a snowflake is hexagon which means it has a unique form but it also
has a unique relationship to that form each time it manifests. So if you're ever walking
through a snowstorm you're actually being bombarded with unique
instances of weather patterns. Now, considering we're here at Google, weather patterns are
some of the most complex things that human beings have ever tried
to model. So you need a super computer system to understand the wind. You need a massive
computational logic just to understand ocean currents. So now if you
apply that model to native beings and economics we're placed in this context where most of
modern economics is just a belief system and we still are trying
to figure this stuff out. There's people like Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes; very
few people would have been able to understand the complexity of the
2008 economic crisis and meltdown but you know at the end of the day when you think
about economics, it's about how people structure themselves in
relationship to society. So the reason I brought up the New Economic Foundation earlier is
that they rated Vanuatu through the Happy Planet Index and they
were ripping on this from the Tanna point of view here because I'm fascinated with this
idea of free time and free space. And as a New Yorker those are two
very scarce things that we inhabit. I mean, if you think about the idea that most people
are running around paying their credit card bill or having to deal
with all the different kinds of micro finance, micro credit you know, we might as well call
it a plantation system at this point. We are just all like
micro serfs like Douglas Cooper in his book, right? So the Happy Planet Index tries to
understand gross domestic product through other metrics, through other
ways of measuring productivity. So the GDP, gross domestic product, is something that
basically is about 19 century models being applied to a 21st century
economy, they don't work. So the happiness index, it's kind of a new way of looking at
how people product material value but also psychological value. If
there's anything, if you look at the root word of credit which is something I love to
point out to economists, it just simply means credere which is the
Latin term for believe. So Adam Smith had a great phrase where he said, "All money is
just a matter of belief." So imagine if you're on an island and the
chief of a certain region approaches you which is a gentleman by the name of Isso Kapum and
his father Jack Kapum. They are walking down a dirt road like me
and Annie were doing one time and we ended up bumping into these two gentleman and we
got into a long conversation about why are you here
[laughs]
and I majored in philosophy and French literature. I don't know if anybody out there knows Bowdoin
College but Bowdoin is one of the Little Ivies. We are very
competitive with Harvard, you know? But, so, I was very philosophical about this when I
meant these two gentleman and I said, "You know, I have some mix CD's.
I keep hearing reggae blasting out of these cars. Why don't you guys listen to old school
reggae and not the commercial, kind of crappy stuff?" It's a long
story. I work with Trojan Records which is a legendary Jamaican record label and in London
a couple of years ago they gave me access to a huge warehouse of
old 45 vinyl. So I collect like, this is when Bob Marley was 18 for example and he's singing
great stuff or Lee "Scratch" Perry so I always carry a couple of
CD's with me as you guys didn't notice that, right? So I pulled the "gift economy" on them.
I pull out a mix CD of old school reggae, give it to them, and
then a couple, like we ended up staying like a lot longer then we were planning because
we didn't feel like going back to New York. A couple of days later
we started hearing old school reggae coming from a couple of different places and I realized
that people had made copies of the mix and were passing it
around. What ended up happening is the music became a kind of fun way of saying this is
a "gift economy" from a New Yorker to you. And I noticed that people,
even to this day, the last time I went back to Vanuatu I heard some of the mixed I had
made being played around the island so that was a real interesting
thing, turning upside down the idea of music and value, music and economy, and saying that
the gift which people like Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss write about
very eloquently. The gift is what broke the ice. So I'm telling you guys a story here.
I mean, I could easily, because we're at Google, I could get into
hardcore theory speak about the notion of the metrics of how you measure happiness and
thinking about the notion of how you quantify this idea of a gift to
someone else because it creates a relationship and there's a dynamic logic tree that actually
applies to how people pass information between people. But
that's the term of the gentleman by the name of Norbert Wiener, if anybody out there has
ever heard of cybernetic theory or information theory and exchange
mechanisms and so on, so I'll leave that for another lecture. So when I started my discussion
about playing you guys "Meet The Natives", these are people who
are inhabiting a very complex space and culture and I'm fascinated with that because precisely
in the West we might have actually tried to catch up to them.
The reason I'm thinking about this as an artist is not only because we're setting up a contemporary
art center but the way we're trying to kind of look at
graphic design. I just did a project called "Green Patriot" with a gentleman by the name
of Shep Fairey who did the Obama "Hope" poster. We did this project
looking at green graphic design and then you realize if you go to a place like Tanna, they've
incorporated the idea of sustainability into the very clothing.
You have people wearing grass skirts and they're also looking at this idea of sustainability
but they also have problems of their own. They have various
medical issues, various issues with like pollution and composting and so on. So in the US we
have problems but at the same time these are issues that we need
to understand through the prism of art and that's where I think the Vanuatu Project is
really going to be all about this idea of carbon negative structures,
carbon negative architecture, and above all carbon negative senses of social space. How
do we create this idea of hitting the reset button on creativity by
giving people free space and free time? So what I'm going to be looking at is bamboo
architecture as a main motif for the project and thinking about using
local materials in the same way, like I was saying earlier, the indigenous people already
are doing but perhaps bringing a little bit of our tech may and our
digital media into collision with theirs. So Tanna is at a certain kind of crossroads.
The oceanic culture, the Melanesian culture that it comes from is
under a kind of ebb and flow. People are leaving the smaller islands and going to the larger
islands because in the same way that in the US, and in most
countries of the world, young people are leaving the countryside and going to the big city.
Now, that kind of brain drain is something that inspired Jack
Kapum and Isso Kapum to approach us to think about, "Wait a second, maybe we can do an
experiment together. Maybe we can figure out a way to get the young
people on the island to stay." So the music that I gave them started being copied and
passed around. People realized that there was a kind of relationship
between you know, in New York we would just call it old school, you know? Like old school
reggae and old school hip-hop and when they were hearing all
this new digital music coming out of their cell phones. We were there, for example, when
the first cell phone network was made on the island. They realized
they liked some of the older stuff and people were passing that around so it became part
of the "gift economy". Again, what I was invoking earlier. So I made
the logo for the project. I'm a graphic designer and I'm also thinking about relationships
to memory. I'm thinking about how sampling is a kind of "gift
economy" in it's own right where you're editing memories and transforming sounds from this
idea of a shareware culture but what happens when that becomes
dematerialized? What happens when an artist says, "Let'*** the reset button". So today
I stand in front of you working with people like Islandsfirst.org,
umm, let me just call everything up first. Umm, and they're our fiscal sponsor for the
Tanna Center for the Arts and the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation
precisely because we view this idea of collaboration and sharing as a basic principle of the foundation.
The idea, Manhattan itself is an island. I mean,
don't be fooled. We are just a huge, concrete, super imposition to what had essentially been
a very beautiful place. So island to island, Manhattan to Tanna; I'm thinking a lot more
about this idea of how free space and free time can allow artists, writers, musicians
to actually kind of get a new way of dealing
with not only their own work but saying, "Let's look at the future here. Let's think about
the next twenty years, the next thirty years." And when happens
when you're looking at places like Macdowell Colony or when you're looking at Yaddo Colony.
You have to imagine that these are places that are well funded
and have had a tremendous amount of backing. The Tanna Center for the Arts and the Vanuatu
Pacifica Foundation are crowd sourced from the ground up. We
started everything off from a two starter campaign and in fact we had, we're just at
the edge of it so if people out there want to donate, please do. It's
fully tax deductible. But the whole notion of an outsourced arts center that's turned
into this idea that's upside down. We don't have the normal patron
system and we don't need the normal grant kind of foundational stuff going on. The whole
notion is that this is going to be a crowd sourced initiative based
on substantiality in the arts and want to get people to think about what happens when
you leave your comfort zone. What happens when you hit the reset button?
Not only on the creative process in general but getting people to just say this is something
that should be celebrated. So the foundation is going to be an
enabler, a foundation, a platform. We're going to be inviting artists, writers, composers,
theoreticians out to the island to hang out but not just hang out
like sitting on a beach someplace but to see how the indigenous population works and above
all to say this is a dialogue, it's a conversation, it's a Socratic
situation. I love this idea. It's a long story. I majored in philosophy and French literature
and to go back to what I was saying with William Gibson earlier
is a great phrase where he says, "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."
And I'm going to show a quick example of some of my artwork
for a second just to give you an idea of why I enjoy that kind of paradox. When you think
about digital literacy, one of the first things that comes to mind
is that digital is a specifically kind of mathematical formula. In fact, one could argue
that analog systems are actually far more complex so the human eye
and the human ear are complex information gathering systems. Behind me you have a very
famous photograph from Georges Melies who popularized what we like to
call stop motion photography. So this is the cover of "Scientific American" in 1915. What
you're seeing is something that human beings have not been able to
see before. Motion had been cut up and captured into small fragments so when you hear a digital
voice coming out your cell phone, your voice has also been
carved up into small data packets, sent through a network, and someone else has to then hear
it but a computer compiles those data packets and makes it
become a coherent signal. So the human eye is not digital. We are analog viewers, analog
listeners. The brain operates with a deep degree of complexity and
nuance and layers. But I love this photograph precisely because it's kind of at the edge
of paradox. In 1915, this was a wild new statement about visuality. So
if we fast forward to 2010, how do we read these new forms of data? How do we think about
the way human beings structure and exchange information and
content? By the way, if you can't read that, which probably most of you are not computers
and you can't, it's the URL for the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation.
So my QR prints as part of this exhibition were kind of data packets that I wanted to
set up. If you go up to the prints out in front of here and you put
your cell phone up to them, they'll take you to the Vanuatu Pacifica site, they'll take
you to the YouTube clips and video channel, and above all they're
going to be using your cell phone as a portal into this different world of Tanna time. So
the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation is looking at different forms of
digital literacy from the viewpoint of ancient to the future, much in the same way as this
exhibition is. We are saying that, like William Gibson, the future
is already here, it's just unevenly distributed but above all as artists, writers, and musicians
I think we have a responsibility to get people free space to
re-imagine the near future because - well, after just coming back from the North Pole
I can tell you it looks pretty grim. I spent four weeks carrying a
studio around the North Pole. I don't know if you can see since it's pretty dark, and
the idea was to give to several of the main ice fields and do what I
like to call acoustic portraits of ice; all of this is on my website by the way. So I
carried a studio around and this is going to be a small group of string
quartet works and the year before that I went to the South Pole. I went to Antarctica for
four weeks and did a serious of acoustic portraits of ice as well. So
sitting around just kind of literally for hours and hours walking through huge ice fields,
I was able to see, regretfully the screens are a little bit dark
but these are massive, massive ice boulders that had just shattered off of these huge
glaciers. Now this is going to be a picture book, it's my next book and
this is going to be a series of photo portraits mixed with sort of eco statements and analysis
of the quantum physics of ice. If anyone out there knows
Brian Greene, he did a great book called "The Elegant Universe". He is writing the introduction
of my book about the quantum psychics of ice because it
exists between solid and liquid and it's a very interesting format. So, to make a long
story short, I have a very omnivoris appetite for this idea of music as
information but music refuses to be contained in the normal way. So above all, say for example,
I'm going to just wrap up with moving from Vanuatu and Tanna
to this idea of the temples of the Western Society. I got the Greek government to give
me the Acropolis for a day for example and we had a huge happening.
And about 5,000 plus people came to the show and it was at the Herod Atticus Temple. And
this is hip-hop so you know you got to do "Yo" kind of a situation
[laughs]
so we put a huge bass sound system throughout the ruins of the Acropolis and that's for
scale. That's the Herod Atticus Theatre where we have
projection screens, digital media, high definition projection and we had about 5,000 people come
to the show. So I was like, "Hey everybody, thanks for
coming to the show. I think I'm the first deejay to play here in 3,000 years. Thanks
for coming out. [laughter]
And the whole set from the viewpoint of digital
media that I was sampling a live string quartet. I had Kronos Quartet play the compositions,
sampled that, and then played it through various software and
digital media. So that's the embodiment of what I'm talking about. This notion of the
future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. And the Greeks
had a great situation where they're like, "Well, why do you want to play a *** film
at the Acropolis?" It's a perfectly valid question, right? And I said,
"Well, you guys are Greek. You have comedy, tragedy." And then they're like, "Oh, we get
it." You know with Vanuatu one of the things that makes me chuckle
over the fact that you have this idea of nonlinearity, nonsense of structured time so we're going
to open a space up to this idea that people can hang out,
literally the hangout, capital H, capital O, and the notion here is that we're going
to be asking artists do many residences and we're going to be asking
them to say, "Hey, look and work and think about these ideas of indigenous practices",
and putting it in front of the kind of situation where people say
digital media doesn't have to be alienated and divorced from traditional ecological knowledge.
In fact, we're going to be using it as a way of empowering
people to think about the environment, empowering people to think about other forms of alternative
energy like bio fuels, like solar power, and above all
looking at ocean currents, wind currents, stuff like that. So the idea here is that
art doesn't have to be something that's based in the now. It can be
something that says another world was possible. So what I want to do with this evening is
hopefully invoke the idea of an art center, an art space that says
let's think of the future. Let's think about art as a way of getting people to think about
and reframe the relationship to their future because right now, you
know, it looks pretty freaking grim. So I'm going to just end this with the Kickstarter
campaign and appeal which is to say this is a crowd source initiative and it's an art
project based on this idea of a social sculpture. It's something that says by participating
in it, you become a stakeholder and by becoming a stakeholder, you become someone who's an
enabler. Someone who says this is a project that I value and respect and hopefully participate
in. So over the next couple of months, we are going to be doing a series of initiatives
based on bamboo architecture, bamboo design. And in fact we just had a benefit the other
day and we had a group of people who came up with this idea of the bamboo bicycle studio
which is what we're going to be trying to get some of the guys on the island to check
out as well. Whoops, okay. [pause] And we had these guys who are master bicycle builders
come to the event and we're offering for anyone out there who has been intrigued by the whole
notion is you can see about design and sustainability very easily and you can see these are bicycles
being made by hand and the bamboo is shaped and molded, and it's also stronger then steel.
If you treat bamboo correctly, it's actually easy to manipulate. If you go to Hong Kong
or Singapore or Shanghai, you can see whole skyscrapers of bamboo next to it. And by training
people to use sustainable materials and local materials but in a high tech context, you
get people to feel much more empowered. I think right now in the West people feel like
technology is beyond them and they are just kind of passive recipients. With the Tanna
Center for the Arts, we're going to be setting up a context where people who feel very comfortable
digging in and creating new forms of art based on sustainable materials. Bamboo is one of
them but we also think about wind power, solar power, and other initiatives so we have relationships
with Solar One, we have relationships with Islandsfirst.org and so on. So what I want
to do, in some terms of wrapping up, is to say it's a foundation and we have the, think
about the titles of the people involved. We have Janna Olson here who is the Vanuatu Pacifica
Foundation Executive Director and Cultural and Operational Liaison to the Tanna Center
for the Arts; there's John in the back; so she's going to be kind of helping guide the
process through and we have Laura Clemens, the Director of Development and Strategic
Partnerships; she's here. So you guys can consider yourselves kind of at the beginning
of an initiative that's going to be looking at technology and traditional ecological knowledge.
We're going to be building bridges between cultures rather than building boundaries between
cultures. We're going to be looking at the idea of not only free and open exchange but
the idea of the gift between cultures. It means love is received rather than the usual
Western model of just rapacity and taking everything so from Nauru to Vanuatu hopefully
we won't have an island that looks like this. We'll have an island that looks a little bit
more like, you know, the voice or something like that of various new forms of material
coming out, The New Economic Foundation. So if anybody is in town over the next couple
of days, the TED conference is coming up, TED Brooklyn and I'm on stage, believe it
or not, with Barbara Bush so to me that is so mind blowing it's science fictional and
we're going to be having a kind of lingering debate about some of these issues with, about
sustainability in the arts and saying well everything Bush; it's a long story. Anyway,
if you're around and if this is one event that you might enjoy, and we have the mailing
list for the Vanuatu Group through DJ Spooky.com. That's just my website right here and our
board for the project, we have people as diverse. Let me just show you a couple of things and
then I'm going to open up the questions. Let's say for example our initial benefit event
was hosted by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. We have Majora Carter who is involved
with quite a bit of really amazing ecological and environmental issues in the South Bronx.
We have Catherine Corman who her father is Roger Corman and a well renowned filmmaker.
She is doing a lot of really interesting stuff around contemporary art. David Adjaye who
is probably one of Africa's premiere architects. We have Shep Fairey who did the Obama "Hope"
poster and he's a very renowned graphic designer. Liam Gillick who is probably one of the top
conceptual artists going right now. Roselee Goldberg who does performer biennials, one
of the top performance arts biennials in the country right now. We have Bill T. Jones who
also did the "Fela!" kind of dance piece. We have Mitchell Joachim who is a renowned
ecological activist and designer. We have Young Jean Lee who is a very amazing theatre
playwright. Joe Melillo who is head of BAM, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Meredith Monk.
Ravi Naidoo who does this sort of incredible design conference in South Africa called Design
Indaba which focuses on open source initiatives throughout Africa. We have Bill Moggridge
who is essentially the inventor of the laptop as we know it so we have a pretty heavyweight
group of people and if you scroll down a little more we have good old, a big hero of mine,
Bruce Sterling, who is a science fiction writer. Jimmy Wales who started Wikipedia, and Yoko
Ono who's just - well, she's Yoko. So we have a great group of people on the board for the
foundation and you guys are just essentially witnessing the absolute first, first tiny
baby steps of the kick off of a new, and I'm hoping very important, cultural foundation.
So the artwork outside, I did the coffee prints and I did the QR prints as well. So I guess
with that said and done, think of the place as a forum for exchange, an open forum about
open issues and I'm hoping that on one level or another you guys are inspired enough to
donate to the Tanna Center for Arts. You can do it through Kickstarter, through your Amazon.com
account. It's really easy and it's fully tax deductible so that's contemporary art as a
social sculpture. Thank you.
[applause]
>>Male Narrator: Thank you very much for the whirlwind tour through all kinds of ideas
and an introduction to your project. So we do have some time for questions. We have to
be out of the building by 7:30 but Paul's agreed to take some questions and then we
can - we have some time to look around.
>>Paul Miller: I also have copies of my book as well if anyone wants to take a glance.
[video sound fades out]
>> Male Audience member: So you mentioned that [inaudible]
>>Paul Miller: Mm-hmm.
>> Male Audience member: [inaudible]
Paul Miller >> Uh huh.
>> Male audience member: [inaudible]
>>Paul Miller: No, I think the value system, I'll give a quick summary just in case you
didn't hear him. He was saying I had brought some mixes with me and then I started hearing
the mixes being copied and passed around. While we were there, there's a really interesting
telecom company called Digicel and it's a Jamaican-Irish company
[laughs]
that specializes in setting up cell phone networks in remote islands so while we were
there Digicel set up the first network of cell phones and we started seeing kids dancing
to ringtones as they would be walking down a dusty road in the middle of the island with
a cell phone that the company was very clever and gave away a lot of cell phones for free
to get people into the network. Then they set up these pay per go plans and stuff like
that so because they essentially have a subsistence economy. But if you have a beautiful place
with plenty of fresh fish, you have free bananas, free kava roots, and free everything that
you can possibly eat, why do you need to work? That is not a 9 to 5 kind of grind. So they
were able to pass ringtones around and stuff like that and people would gather around.
One of my first meetings when I got back to Vanuatu this year was we had a meeting with
some of the chiefs in this one area near the center and I pulled out my cellphone and started
showing them not only about this software, the deejaying with the phone. So I'm talking
like all the kids gathered around and were watching because my cell phone was iPhone
and they only have the kind of earlier phones that are basic so they had never seen an iPhone,
you know? So when I talk about mixes and exchange, I mean the thing for me is always saying that
these are about the positive effects of scalability. I say the positive because if you have a negative
feedback loop it means certain things are kind of, it's not a bad term, it's actually
a reasonably good term but what ends up happening with feedback mechanisms and so on is either
people take the music and run with it or they take the music and say, "This is ***. ***
this." You know? So that was a positive situation to me all puns intended, not only just about
positive feedback mechanisms and so on. So amplification, there's a style of music there
called string band music that's very popular but it's very resonate with reggae so I think
that's what ended up happening is people have a bootleg economy already where they're passing
around mixes and there's all sorts of stuff going on that people trade, you know, without
the norms of money so it's not necessarily a paper economy and that's what I wanted to
kind of get into when I was talking about mixes and exchange.
>> Audience Member: So you were saying earlier that [inaudible]
>>Paul Miller: Right. It's the total flip side of the capitalist economy. I mean, when
you think about our Western culture. We derive value from scarcity and there's a really famous
section of "Wealth of Nations" when Adam Smith says, "Why is a diamond more expensive then
water?" Water is precious to life when our bodies are 92% water but why does somebody
want some weird stone from the ground, you know? I mean it's like people go to war over
it, like diamonds and rubies. They'll raid other villages because you know, if you're
in Congo for example but water, which is precious to everything we know, they're like, "Ugh,
who cares?" you know? So the value of something and the scarcity can always be, there's an
eerie correlation and I can say the same thing about cobalt for example in the Congo which
is a very scarce metal and the same thing is going on in China with what they call rare
earths. The more rare something is, the more we assign value to it and I'm giving a tiny
Economics 101 here, but what I'm doing with the idea of the "gift economy" is saying that
it's about dematerialization of those values and saying, "Wait a second. Let's think about
social capital, cultural capital", which a lot of people in the West are now studying
rigorously. Pierre Bourdieu, who is a French cultural theoretician, and there is an economist
named Raj Patel who has a book called "The Value of Nothing". It's a really great book
and Naomi Wolfe's whole theory of "Shock Doctrine" and so on. There's a lot of people trying
to question why scarcity. Why? The big why with a capital W and I think there's something
to be said for resetting the idea of values and that's something I'm really interested
in right now. I wouldn't say it's about storming Wall Street and saying everything needs to
be torn down because they're doing it themselves anyway, you know? It's like, you know, the
market system as we know with what they call collateralized debt obligations and the futures
market. Those are just what they call quantitative methods of creating value out of nothing.
I mean, the dollar, it's not based on any specific gold or anything. It's just electronic
values flying around, zeros and ones. So what happens if our zeros and ones don't match
the Vanuatuans zeroes and ones, you know? I think we operate somewhere in the gap between
those two economies.
>>Female audience member: I have a thought on [inaudible]
Paul Miller >> Yeah, yeah. Well, there's links on our website where we are sort of showing
people. I wouldn't say that it's a specific, because there's a lot of different, like if
you go to Bhutan for example and what they call happiness commissions where every project,
literally every project initiated by people has to be approved by a happiness commission
to see if it add happiness and value to the culture
[laughs from crowd] That's serious. I couldn't make this up so
you end up with a happiness bureaucracy which is not very happy. I think any time you standardize
stuff - imagine being in Bhutan and you're like, "I need to grow a new field because
I need to get whatever", and you have to prove that the new field and the rice and planting
the rice would make people more happy. The question you're asking is how do measure.
The metrics are very ambiguous. I mean, the metrics of how we quantify the idea of consumerism.
The western model has always been based on what they call the rational consumer. If you
put enough bananas on a table, how much will people pay for that? Now the rational consumer
will only pay as much as they blah, blah; everything outside of that is what they call
an opportunity cost or this or that and the economic impact of if actually takes all the
bananas and leaves Jill with no bananas, you know? It's one of those weird Economic 101
kind of things where if you give Jill two bananas and you have three bananas then the
value is somewhere between those two and three bananas. So in Vanuatu what I noticed is that
a lot of the issues are around trade and commerce just for goods that people all have. So if
you have a plot of land with several coconuts and your neighbor has several coconuts and
you need some kava, you're like, "Look, alright. I'll give you a certain amount of coconuts",
or something like that. It's back to old school but it's very complex and I like that in a
way, you know?
>> Female audience member: I wanted to pose a question of [inaudible].
>>Paul Miller: Right. These are, she was saying she'd read the Wikipedia entry on Vanuatu
which is exactly eerily precise. Whoever did the crowd sourcing of the wiki for Vanuatu
is pretty good. You're right. They, like any other culture, are facing a lot of complex
issues and they're remote so these are things that are not just part of the core of places
like India or China where overpopulation is massive and degradation of resources is happening.
It's just they're slightly later on the curve. They are more of the ripple effect of this
massive hyper urbanization that's been going on. This is all stuff that they're probably
going to be facing over the next 20 years rather than the last 20 years like China and
India. I'm hoping we can use the center as a place of showing and also learning from
some of their tradition of saying they've had stability and peace and whatever you want
to call it, that kind of equilibrium, for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why haven't
they had major genocidal wars? Why haven't they had in a way all the things that the
West has gone through? One could argue because there's enough space. If you don't like this
one tribe, you can go to the next island over or you know there's plenty of arguments if
you look at the anthropological history, different cultures in conflict. You're talking about
overpopulation and that leads to war, leads to competition for resources, it leads to
a lot of things that usually cause massive friction, right? So I'm intrigued by the human
dynamics and the idea of social dynamics in general. We have a lot to learn. We're starting
this foundation based on, it's like I just feel like I've just leaped into the air and
who's like waiting to see what I would hit. Luckily a lot of people caught us with the
Kickstarter campaign. But at the end of the day you're right. It's overpopulation is going
to be a factor down the line. Right now, there's a lot of open land and people are kind of,
there's land in dispute everywhere because they still don't have our notions of Western
ideas of sequestering a land and blocking off and destroying the common. That's what
happened with a lot of the West. The commons, if you look at the tragedy of the commons,
that's a very famous term from the late 60's. There are places like Ireland where the English
landlords cleared everyone out just for farming for sheep and then caused this huge starvation
and all this stuff. Nothing like that has happened there. They are like, "Hey, we all
are here. We'll work things out." So there's a lot of ambiguous negotiation of this social
space of economics but I like what you did. The fact that you brought up Joseph Beuys
who is a big influence on the project. The idea of a social sculpture and yeah, Rirkrit
Tiravanija. I always, Tira the Ninja, thank you and there's a lot of other artists who've
done land projects like Paolo Soleri with the Arcosanti project and architecture. We're
going to be looking at bamboo as a kind of core component of the project so all of these
things are things we're thinking about and we're going to be learning as we go. I'm not
walking with any fixed formula. The idea is to learn and to evolve the project as it goes.
>> Female audience member: It's great that you've gotten to [inaudible] insert and ecological
context, [inaudible].
>>Paul Miller: Well, I mean, there's something to be said about the way the West goes about
lecturing people and I want to be cautious about going into another culture and saying
you should do this and you should do that. Birth control is always a very touchy topic.
I mean it reaches to the core of how people live.
>>Female audience member: It's global healthcare.
>>Paul Miller: Yeah, healthcare and so on. We're not a hospital. I mean, we are going
to be doing a lot of creative initiatives but I do want to differentiate us from Doctors
without Borders and stuff like that. I mean, there's a lot to be said for the medical needs
of the population as well. In a certain sense, art, why art at all, you know? The people
have needs. They need a lot of attention for other projects and situations. They need roads,
they need infrastructure and so on. In the face of that art seems like this very fragile
and tenuous thing for them but at the same time I think it's ever more important to give
people a sense of a different perspective on things, a different frame, a different
ideological kind of lens to view things through. If that is, it's not an either or. It's not
like bread and butter versus culture and butter, more like having them all. I think one leads
to the other. So I think we have time for a couple more questions.
>> Male Narrator: Well, just one quick question and then we need to start packing up. Anyone?
>>Paul Miller: Well, what I want to do say is that if you have a secondary follow-up
question, you can go by the website. It's DJSpooky.com. There's a button that says "Contact"
and I'm a hardcore e-mailer and that goes to our team but I just would love to encourage
everyone to please think about donating to the cause and it's fully tax deductible. I
mean, $20.00 for your dinner or $30.00 for your dinner is subway fare or something. So
if you're interested it's through the Kickstarter campaign and it's a fun and interesting project
you can watch evolve over the next two years, three years, four years, twenty years. I have
copies of my book here and I also brought some stickers that I'm giving away for free,
stickers for this project called "Copyright Criminals". I have other freebies if you guys
are interested but yeah, come on up and check out the books and stuff like that.
[applause]
>> Male Narrator: Thank you very much. [inaudible] Thank you.