Jun 15
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INTERCEPTED PODCAST with DJ SPOOKY: THE TRUMP MIXTAPE

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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.

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May 28
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Atlantic Magazine feature on DJ Spooky

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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.

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Apr 21
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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.

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Feb 22
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Birth of a Movement: The Battle Against America’s First Blockbuster

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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

Jan 23
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Birth of a Movement Trailer

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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.

Nov 11
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Forests: A Parallax View in Music

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By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see Nature.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

It’s been said that wilderness holds answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask. Here’s a question: How would you make a composition out of a forest? Would you have instruments made from wood? Well, that’s already been done for hundreds of years—every single instrument that influences our modern sensibility comes from wood or metal. But what about the information that forests generate? That’s what I thought about when I began work on a symphony about forests.

It’s been decades since Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer coined the term “soundscape” but for me, a 21st century update is the term “acoustic environment.” It’s an idea that informs my work, and that give me inspiration for a project that, at core,is as much about the collision between code and culture, as it is about the massive disruption of the ecosystem.

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Nov 04
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DJ Spooky’s Heart of a Forest Tour

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PROJECT INFO HERE
EVENT INFO HERE

November 6, 4 p.m. – Enterprise, hosted by Fishtrap
November 9, 7 p.m. – Portland, hosted by World Forestry Center
Win tickets to the Portland event HERE
November 10, 7 p.m. – Newport, hosted by Newport Performing Arts Center
November 11, 6 p.m. – Bend, hosted by The High Desert Museum

DJ Spooky will mix live, recorded and electronic music with aerial video of Oregon forests, along with an on-stage conversation with a forest ecologist. The multimedia show is inspired by symphonic music Miller composed during four seasonal artist residencies at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades. The score, which was debuted and recorded with the Oregon State University Wind Ensemble earlier this year, metaphorically explores spring, summer, fall and winter through sound and imagery.

For the Heart of a Forest project, Miller wanted to understand “how to remix some of the ways we think about traditional forms of music versus digital interpretation of nature. Is the landscape a portrait? Is a composition a portrait? I think we need music to catalyze how we can rethink our relationship to nature.” Miller says that the piece is inspired by Thoreau and the collision of data, sound and new ways to think about the absence of origins.

Jul 10
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PIONEERS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN CINEMA

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Landmarks of early African-American film, remastered in HD from archive elements, digitally restored, loaded with bonus content. Created by Kino Lorber.

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“This very special collection illuminates one of the most fascinating and unjustly neglected corners of American movie history.” Martin Scorsese on Pioneers of African American cinema.

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