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[Music]
DJ SPOOKY: I'd say the Internet has radically changed most people's visions of culture and
taste and whatever context they find themselves in.
[Music]
As a DJ and writer and musician, I keep track of a lot of developments in technology because
it goes into my creative process. So a painter for many centuries had used paint for their
pallet. My pallet is digital media. When you look at a DJ mix or a video mix—edit—there's
a paradox going on because you're in the world of the unfinished work. You can just open
the file up and change it. To me, editing itself is an art form, like how you put together
anything. A painting, a sculpture, a video media file, you name it. All of it is still
part of this notion of creativity. The fact that, for me at least, the 21st century we're
now in the era of the unfinished work. So whenever I don't like something, I'm just
like well there was one version, here's another version, there's another version and they're
all equally interesting as long as whatever somebody's taste is. What do I consider success
as a contemporary artist? It's about ideas. I love the idea when you're saying like how
do you change ideas and people and all these things? At the end of the day, right now,
as I sit here in this room in the 21st century my major worry is climate change because I
think we're really messing the planet up. And you're like how can art reframe that?
How do we hit the reset button on people's imagination. Or the fact that we have all
these shootings right now and people are just like—the correlation between guns and ***
is pretty clear, y'know, but people will still until—I think until somebody says or an
art piece or something comes along that just gets people out of these psychologies. It
is psychological. That's where I think art can kind of reach in and reframe things in
a way that make people say y'know, let's look at this in a different way. It's a hope, I
mean, I'm not saying art's gonna change everything. I'm not saying art is going to be the answer
if you need food on your table, but being able to reimagine things is the first step.
[Music]
I'd say the Internet has radically changed most people's visions of culture and taste
and whatever context they find themselves in. What's fascinating right now is that global
culture is responding to the US in a way that our rhythms and the beats and the kind of
pop culture goes out to all these other places. What's so beautiful about that is the whole
sense that people are much more aware of what's going on culturally than every before. When
I do museum and gallery shows, when I write, when I do all sorts of stuff, my first thought
is how do I communicate a complex idea across several cultures because it's not just about
America for me. It's really not. And in fact, I'm on this next book with MIT. It's about
apps so it's called the Imaginary App and we're getting essays from China, from Korea,
Russia, y'know, India about the way apps have radically changed these local cultures. Just
for the iPad alone, there's been over 25 billion apps downloaded. Y'know in just two years.
It just… So there's been a tsunami of creativity unleashed. This kind of hyper-exchange of
culture is healthy. Y'know, because I think what ends up happening with humanity is actually
use that as points of empathy, points of being able to relate to other cultures.
I'm Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, and you're watching Epiphany.