senseofplace LAB – laurie halsey brown

DJ in the Anarctic
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In 2008 Paul Miller went to Antarctica to shoot a film about the sound of ice, and ended up creating an installation out of the journey. Paul Miller recasts the epic detritus of the art and other cultural worlds as skillfully handled archival video samplings, digital prints, and drawings, calling into question the value of appropriation and the status of the copy. Finding inspiration in historic documents and films like James F. Cook’s infamous 1912 film “The Truth about the Pole” (a false narrative made by the “explorer” using the North Pole as a film studio, Cook tried to portray himself in a documentary he self-financed as the true discoverer of the North Pole), and rare images of Admiral Byrd’s 1939 voyage to the South Pole, Miller explores the range of “truth” in modern portrayals of the explorer’s path. In 2007-2008 Miller spent four weeks in Antarctica re-tracing several explorers’ journeys and with his “North/South” show, he reconstructs a collage of their journals and ephemera in multiple contexts. Using materials as diverse as John Cage’s 1938 “Imaginary Landscape #1″ as an inspiration (it was the first composition written for turntables) Miller looks at how documents and archival materials influence perception of history and the search for the explorer’s goal of defining new frontiers. In “North/South” he deftly recontextualizes the rhetorical tropes of music notation and graphic design to mine the intersection of public and personal.

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