E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spooky’s world (continued)

Miller is unambivalent regarding his feelings about the film. "Well, yeah, there’s always a sense of distance with anything that’s totally racist," he says, laughing.

The piece began as a commission from the Lincoln Center Festival for a 2004 performance, and Miller estimates that he’s done it 20 times worldwide, including shows in Vienna and at the Spoleto USA Festival in Charleston and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Performing on stage with a bank of computers, he projects scenes from the original film while his "remixes" play on two other screens augmented by the visual equivalent of overlays and scratching. He likens it to "call and response." He will also remix Robert Johnson’s "Phonograph Blues" as source for the soundtrack, and he’ll intersperse other images, such as architectural diagrams of prisons and segments of a Bill T. Jones dance.

"One thing I noticed after a while of presenting the film," he remarks, "is that the audience responded to certain body-language issues in the film — there are certain core scenes where the body language is very dancelike, and that’s where I could see a mesmerizing quality pop out of the story. In the early silent films, the story was in body language."

Miller focused on a few key sequences to capture the film and its special body language. One of the multiple parallel stories in the film regards two families — one from the North, one from the South — who are destroyed by the war. He focuses on the two sons of those families dying on the battlefield. "There’s another scene where the blacks riot in the master’s hall and take over and all the whites are banished, and there’s an election where whites are turned away from the voting booths." He laughs. "But then the whites turn away the blacks from voting. I highlight both election irregularities." And, of course, there is the surrender at Appomattox.

Miller sees The Birth of a Nation as the beginning of the creation of a "construction of whiteness" in America, and of "the other." "There was no central idea of what a white American was back at the turn of the century. You gotta remember that there were all these different ethnic groups — Irish, Germans, Swedes, Jews. Everyone was beginning to bubble up over here. And you know, there were plenty of signs saying ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ There was racism among whites toward each other."

Is he trying to pose a counter-narrative to The Birth of a Nation?

"It’s more like saying, look, our media-saturated landscape, as we saw with the votes in this past election and in 2000, is always going to have competing stories, competing narratives, competing visions of what’s going on. And sometimes some visions will win, and sometimes some visions will lose. That’s part of basic media ecology in 21st-century America. And I’m trying to think of DJing as media literacy — how to read these bizarre signs of the urban landscape as it becomes more and more digital."

It’s not difficult to see Miller’s point given the power of downloading and the pervasive digital manipulation of images. His original Lincoln Center performance drew some criticism for obscuring Griffith’s original. He insists that he does want to "tell a story" — as he does with all his remixes. If "Rebirth of a Nation" succeeds, it will be because he’s tapped into key images — stereotypes, archetypes — that have become part of our cultural DNA. His most "illbient" recorded work comes across like a dreamscape — messages from the collective unconscious. Certainly the accompanying beautiful disc on Rhythm Science (from the Sub Rosa label) works that way, where a contemporary DJ is mixed against James Joyce reciting "Anna Livia Plurabelle" and a Nuuk Posse track is mixed against Antonin Artaud. The "rhythms" of Rhythm Science are the patterns that repeat themselves across history in all media and languages — music, found sound, images, words.

"The reason I love sampling so much," he concludes, "is because it collapses all these differences we usually have, all these rules and regulations about what can and should be mixed or not mixed. And it breaks all that down — straight out of urban youth culture into the world. We’re trying to change things here — æsthetics and art as a kind of ongoing remix of the way people think of what is possible. My motto is: another world is possible, and to always try to bring it into reality."

Harvard’s Office for the Arts in association with Harvard Friends of Amnesty International will present "DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation" at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Cambridge, next Friday, March 11, at 8 p.m.; call (617) 496-2222. Miller will discuss Rhythm Science at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square, next Thursday, March 10, at 6:30 p.m.; call (617) 661-1515.