PAUL D. MILLER

Southern Archaeology

Paul D. Miller, is a conceptual artist, writer and musician working in New York.

His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, and a host of other periodicals. Miller's first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, was published by MIT Press in April 2004, and was included in several year-end lists of the best books of 2004, including the Guardian (UK) and Publishers Weekly.

In 2005, Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multi-media by contemporary cultural theorists will follow Rhythm Science. In addition to his numerous records and articles released under the DJ Spooky name, other recent projects include the Unfinished Stories - a three way collaborative effort between Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times Critic At Large, Margo Jefferson, and Francesca Harper.

Another important project was a collaboration with Bernard Tschumi, Dean of Columbia University's architecture department, and author of Praxis: Event Cities. This piece debuted at the Venice Bienniale of Architecture 2000. In the magazine world, Miller is co-publisher along with legendary African American downtown poet Steve Cannon of the magazine, A Gathering of Tribes - a periodical dedicated to new works by writers from a multicultural context and he was the first Editor-at-large of the cutting edge digital media magazine, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture.


Artist Statement

'Southern Archaeology' is about looking at the layers of communication, and reading the signs of a culture that I'm not sure about and trying to become literate in its ways. I just flip the script and add the 'obvious' as barcodes and architecture. Literacy was once the realm of power -- people could use it to block you from voting or from owning land or a house.

Today -- can we read our credit cards, ISBNs and whatnot? Does that mean that the economy is based on a lot of stuff that we can't 'read'?

That's one of the central ideas of my exhibition. Is the pen mightier than the hard-drive?

In the South Gallery the architectural blueprints are a meditation on mapping body language - the works are abstractions based on some of the most striking moments of the Civil Rights movement photos of Ernest C. Withers - complete abstraction, though, implies a different kind of legibility. My mom used to say “who speaks through you?” - that's something I thought about when these pieces were being made in Memphis.

Paul Miller Website