DJ Spooky

HK Magazine: What did your parents do? What kind of music did you listen to growing up?
DJ Spooky: I grew up in a very middle class family in Washington DC's academic scene. My father was Dean of Howard University and my mother is a historian of design. My dad collected records, and that sparked my curiosity. I just thought that record sleeves like Miles Davis "Bitches Brew," or John Coltrane's "OM," or anything by James Brown just looked super cool. That inspired my art and ideas.

HK: How did a literature/philosophy student become a hip-hop DJ? And how does your intellectual background affect your music?
Spooky: I guess out of the three things I do, music, art and literature, one—music—contributes not ideas, arguments, theories or critiques, but intuitions, perceptions, wandering explorations of unexplored terrain, satiric responses and poetic reactions... My primary game is to tease people into believing my percepts to be theoretical concepts. I love the idea of seeing how hip-hop and sampling really play with everyone's perception of how any sound can be transformed, so basically, it's kind of a game theory. I studied philosophy and French literature, but the best ideas that come out this kind of thinking are compositional: You play with complete control of how anyone would be able to hear something. With turntablism, you play with memory, and make new songs from old. That's what's fun about the “Rebirth of a Nation” project.

HK: Speaking of that, where did the idea of this project come from?
Spooky: Film is a tool that's an extension of economic and political processes. We invent tools, then they reinvent us—that’s how film works. Marshall McLuhan probed how sometimes the real learning happens outside the academic setting. We intend the building designated for learning to nurture, but sometimes it stifles. Every tool has services and disservices. With suspended judgment, we can uncover the hidden effects of our tools, and get a bigger-picture view of the environments that they create. With comprehensive awareness, we can better cope with their hidden effects. But why do we ignore these hidden environments? That's what my remix of D. W. Griffith asks: how can film shape and mold perception? That's what art is about.

HK: Were you familiar with “The Birth of a Nation” before?
Spooky: I'd heard about the original film in history class, because it was extremely controversial. Film allows us to move into an image of the past. And for “Birth,” it writes history falsely and creates a paradox in a present moment. I wanted to figure out a way to look at the film through the prism of conflict and perception: We live in an information economy, and film is a kind of information. That means it can and should be changed. That's why I wanted to remix it. D. W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Einstein were early masters of the art form of editing. I wanted to explore how to edit from the viewpoint of a DJ. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation into the human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium—that's why I think DJ'ing allows me to transform this film. The motto for the project is "director as DJ."

HK: Being African-American yourself, how do you see the racist themes in the film?
Spooky: With the definition of "race" in the US comes a lot of baggage and problems. All of us are "mixed" in the United States—black, white, Asian, Latino. We all have places we have left, and we arrive in this place called the New World. What happened with democracy in the US is that there was a really crazy paradox about what it meant to be human. Black people were not considered human. “The Birth of a Nation” played off of this and created a kind of limbo in identity.

HK: How long did the creative process take? What were the challenges you encountered?
Spooky: The process of editing the film, and putting together a project that set the tone for looking at everything through the prism of sampling, took about a year. Writing the re-score took about six months. The main challenge was to balance between modern issues like "color correction" and making the older film look really cool. It had to have a good, immersive way to pull people into the process. Old black-and-white film doesn't really work these days in color so I had to figure out some ways to make it interesting for a younger audience.