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Reflections on Mortality From a Land of Ice and Snow

By DJ Spooky in The Nation

Antonino D’Ambrosio guest edited the January 28, 2013 issue of The Nation and asked me to write about my Antarctica Terra Nova project. The theme of the issue was “creative-response,” which is the focus of his documentary film “Let Fury Have the Hour.”

Other writers and artists included in the issue were Billy Bragg, Edwidge Danticat, Hari Kunzru, Eugene Hutz, Staceyann Chin and others from his film.

Artist Shepard Fairey created the cover art inspired by Antonino’s cover story “We Own the Future: How Creative-Response Transforms Our World.”

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January 28, 2013
ARTICLESNEWS

DJ SPOOKY in ART PAPERS MAGAZINE

November/December 2012 issue

Art Papers asked Sarah Workneh, Director of Skowhegan Art Foundation to guest edit the magazine. She asked me, and a host of other contemporary African American and diverse artists to come up with some article ideas about post Afro-Futurism.

I wrote about my Antarctic Terra Nova project.

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December 16, 2012
ARTICLESNEWS

Subterranean Cathedral: The Lowline

The Delancey Underground Project – a new underground Park for NY by Daniel Barasch and James Ramsey

“Reality is not always probable, or likely…” Jorge Luis Borges

In a time when most people think about the sky as the limit, and of progress as a timeline pointing further and further towards the heavens, it’s a bit difficult to get people to look down beneath their feet to see what, perhaps, might be a different future. NY has one of the most iconic skylines in the world, and in an area as densely populated as Manhattan, finding open spaces is really about finding the hidden, invisible terrains that make up the fabric of the metropolis. Think of the idea as a kind of exercise in reverse deductive logic about the dimensions of the city that are removed from plain sight, and the rest falls into place. Continued…

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January 16, 2012
ARTICLES

Kumaré: the True Story of a False Prophet

A conversation with Vikram Gandhi

From the origins of mathematics to the rise of the telemarketing and remote information services, on over to everything from Yoga to chicken vindaloo, South Asia has had a turbulent and often times hilarious relationship with the West.

Taking a page from the likes of Sascha Baron Cohen and Kal Penn, and Aziz Ansari, Vikram Ghandi has engaged the West’ s fascination with all things spiritual, and “exotic” about the world of contemporary yoga. Call him a post-modern sadu.

Origin Magazine caught up with him after the release of his new film Kumare.

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August 16, 2011
ARTICLES

Dead Simple: Marshall Mcluhan and the Art of the Record

Artist Statement:
“During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.”
~ Andy Warhol

Mcluhan wrote his stunningly prescient monumental work, one of twelve books and hundreds of articles, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. He followed up with “The Medium is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects” in 1967. The record you hear arrived after that, but it embodied the same ideas. The baseline subject that would preoccupy almost all of McLuhan’s career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it contextualized popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. For him, everything was connected. Because he was one of the first to sound the idea that electronic media and pop culture were eerily interconnected, McLuhan gained the status of a cult hero and “high priest of pop-culture”.

November 10, 2010
ARTICLES

Sound Portrait: Glenn O’Brien

Dialog with Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky

Glenn O’Brien has been an elemental force in Downtown NY for decades. From the time when he was Editor of Interview Magazine under Andy Warhol over to the seminal batch of zany after hours DIY TV shows “TV Party” that featured downtown mainstays like Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Jean Michel Basquiat and others, he combined the prototype for Saturday Nite Live with Reality TV in a way that still has people combing YouTube for gems from the show. O’Brien has shown over the years an enduring ability to understand the currents of “Downtown” in all its manifestations.

Origin Magazine caught up with him to talk about some of his current ideas.

June 7, 2009