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DJ Spooky: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2001 00:23:43 United StatesEnglishColorStereo
Tags:
African-American, Interview, Music, Race, VDB Interviews, Visiting Artists Program

Description

Paul D. Miller (b. 1970) is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician better known as DJ Spooky. A popular and prolific recording artist, he has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), Kool Keith, and Killa Priest (of Wu Tang Clan). Miller’s work uses a wide variety of digitally created music as a form of postmodern sculpture. He has written articles for The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, and Paper, and works as co-publisher of the magazine A Gathering of the Tribes and as editor-at-large of the digital media magazine Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture. In addition, Miller made his foray into fiction with his novel Flow My Blood the DJ Said.

"Fragmentation is perhaps a more wholesome viewpoint in notions of totalized environments," notes the artist in this interview by Romi Crawford and Carol Becker.

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.