While composing Terra Nova, DJ Spooky, a.k.a Paul D. Miller, traveled to Antarctica where he collected sounds, images and inspiration, all compiled in his multimedia masterpiece about a continent that doesn’t get a lot of attention.
The effect is a seamless multi-sensory experience made up of sounds of ice cracking, water flowing and penguins, and live music: piano, cello, violin. Superimposed on large screens are dramatic images – elegant ice formations and jutting mountains viewed from a dizzying prop plane perspective and interwoven with scrolling expository narrative, such as “Antarctica has no government and belongs to no country,” polar coordinates, or Russian, Greek, Arabic or Chinese untranslated characters. As soon as we get the picture that we are here to celebrate a remote and hauntingly beautiful place, we begin to see its destruction. Miller’s images of Antarctic glacial melting don’t convey the usual cheer of Spring and rebirth, instead, in Miller’s work, melting is death.
The performance is so focused on climate change that it is hard to see the other themes that informed Miller’s work. For example, in interviews, he explains that Terra Nova is his new rendition of an old theme in Black culture: ice. “Ice is my palette for this project – think about how many black people call themselves Ice Cube, Ice-T, Soul on Ice, Iceberg Slim etc or bling bling is about ‘ice’,” he said in an interview with Nick Osborn.
My suspension of disbelief was only briefly disrupted by the larger-than-life images of graphs and charts, methodically plotted (and presumably vigilantly and earnestly examined by scientists at some point before they landed in DJ Spooky’s art work,) which soared across the stage. Its as if someone took all the charts and images from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, mixed them together and then released them to ride a chaotic wind of flowing movement. Only the chart’s titles, “Global CO2 Emissions,” or “Sea Level Rise” can be absorbed before a new image is on the screen.
And that led me to my one complaint: in a performance so obsessed with a phenomenon that is only observable scientifically why keep a kindergartner's distance on any sophisticated understanding of science? The swooshing charts felt like a child playing with their food more than any abstract presentation of a higher meaning.
There's also a close call with misinformation. While some graphs show Bangladesh, Louisiana, the Pearl River Delta and the Musandam Peninsula as the hot spots for sea level rise, (OK, most viewers were probably not focusing on the specifics of the images) the performance risked leaving the audience with the impression that Antarctica is the only place in the world affected by climate change – a profound misunderstanding. But let’s not get carried away in the wonkish side of climate change. Miller’s intention is to make audiences feel rather than think.
But my overall impression is that this is definitely worth seeing. And more important, representing a badly needed genre – artists weighing in on perhaps the issue of our time: climate change. If DJ Spooky’s Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica comes to your town, go see it.
Thank you Paul Miller for the great contribution.
(And -- Thanks Cynthia and Sonal for the tickets!)
Posted on December 3, 2009
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