DJ Spooky Remixes Antarctica

Paul D. Miller’s The Book of Ice

(Mark Batty Publisher)

DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) has just released The Book of Ice, a new interactive graphic design project that weaves together the history and future of the human relationship to the wild, inhospitable continent of Antarctica.

At the end of 2007, Miller sailed from the tip of South America through the Drake Passage to reach Antarctica. It’s the only continent without an indigenous human population, and yet it’s particularly sensitive to the effects of human-influenced climate change.

He was intrigued that Antarctica is one of the few places on earth ungoverned by any single nation and off-limits to any military: a sort of political and scientific “commons.” Miller wanted to create music and art that would reflect the underlying geometry and geography of the ice and the development of its crystalline structure, which contains the record of millions of years of environmental change:

“Scientists go to ice fields the way I go to look at my record collection: ice is an archive of data from the planet’s hidden past, preserved and ready for playback with the right devices.”

Over the course of six weeks, he filmed and recorded the sounds of the ice, the oceans, and the animals of Antarctica. He began work on a multimedia portrait of the place, with music and images created from his experience of its landscapes and his understanding of its coming transformations. The first piece of the project was the 70-minute Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, a work for strings, piano, and turntables with a multimedia visual accompaniment.

DJ Spooky in Antarctica (Gary Wintz)

The book is the most recent piece in his ongoing multimedia project. With The Book of Ice, Miller offers a kind of interactive scrapbook of interviews and commentary, historical documents, images, and timelines. To that, he’s added images and maps he’s created himself, exploring the human role in nature and imagining a hypothetical future for Antarctica. The book is embedded with scannable QR codes that act as rabbit holes leading to an online warren of films, music, and animations inspired by Miller’s time exploring the continent and the archives of explorers and scientists who came before.

Miller continues to make art and music about the places on the planet most vulnerable to the changing climate and plans to return to Antarctica. A companion piece to Terra Nova is in the works — a portrait of the Arctic called Arctic Rhythms / Ice Music following his 2010 expedition to Cape Farewell, Greenland. And closer to the equator, he’s partnering with the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation to open a “carbon-negative” art center on one of the islands of Vanuatu, an archipelago threatened by rising seas.

Miller will discuss the science behind Terra Nova at the New York Academy of Sciences on September 19.

Video: DJ Spooky’s Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica