The Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions: supporting the creation and premiere of 50 exceptional new works by world-class artists in partnership with Bay Area nonprofit organizations.
Launched in 2017 in honor of the Hewlett Foundation’s 50th anniversary, the five-year, $8 million initiative awards 10 commissions annually in five performing arts disciplines. These artworks will bring communities together in the Bay Area and go on to inspire, engage, and challenge audiences across the country and around the world in years to come.
DANTE’S INFERNO MEETS DISCO INFERNO
DONALD TRUMP HAS made crystal clear that he has a great affinity for strongmen and for unquestioned loyalty of those who work for him. This week on Intercepted: Trump’s besties in Saudi Arabia convinced him that Qatar, the host of U.S. Central Command, is the premiere Arab nation sponsoring terrorism. Amnesty International’s Sherine Tadros and Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan analyze the hypocrisy-laden, bizarre crisis. We also discuss the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy addresses the Justice Department’s allegations about The Intercept’s recent NSA story and the prosecution of the alleged leaker. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes talks Russia, Trump, the media and his new book, “A Colony in a Nation.” DJ Spooky joins the conversation and imagines a Trump-inspired mash-up of Dante’s Inferno and Disco Inferno.
Why Remix The Birth of a Nation?
A live multimedia performance by the musician DJ Spooky considers the 1915 silent film’s legacy as a pioneering document in alternative facts.
In some dark corners, The Birth of a Nation might be received as enthusiastically today as it was when it debuted in 1915. The silent dramatization of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction was the first American motion picture to be screened at the White House, with President Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet in attendance. While violent racism is not tolerated so openly as it was during Wilson’s day, vintage white nationalism is making a comeback in the Trump era.
DJ Spooky and Greg Niemeyer present a data visualization and a synched sonification addressing the constant expansion of the universe at ZKM_PanoramLab.
Machines allow humans to see past the thresholds of perception into the subliminal, which is too small, and into the supraliminal, which is too vast to see. The constant expansion of the universe is a supraliminal perception: While we can prove that it is happening, we can’t see it or feel it. DJ Spooky (New York) and Greg Niemeyer (California) present a portrait of this expansion, and illustrate how Turing patterns may govern the distribution of galaxies in the universe just as they govern the patterns of fingerprints and zebra stripes. This work has its world premiere at ZKM. Both a data visualization and a synched sonification, supraliminal feels for the beat that fingerprints share with galaxies.
Join the NAACP and DJ Spooky and host a screening of this important film!
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/birth-of-a-movement-full-film/
Boston 1915. African-American newspaper editor and activist William Monroe Trotter wages a battle against D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking blockbuster The Birth of a Nation. A Notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly reimagining of history, Griffith’s motion picture unleashes a conflict that still rages today about race relations, representation, and the power of Hollywood. Narrated by Danny Glover and featuring interviews from Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Spike Lee, Birth of a Movement, based on Dick Lehr’s book The Birth of a Movement captures the backdrop to this prescient clash between human rights, freedom of speech, and a changing media landscape.
Music Score by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
Broadcast Premiere + Independent Lens/PBS
February 6, 2017 + 10PM/9c
Free After Broadcast until 3/9/2017
Supported by: WNET Thirteen, Independent Lens, Northern Light Productions, National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
DJ Spooky is interviewed by PBS for the project Pioneers of African American Cinema
Here’s the trailer for the powerful documentary about the rise of the Civil Rights Movement as a response to the media of the early 20th century. Scored by DJ Spooky – watch the trailer – it’ll be on PBS throughout the next month.
