The Art of Climate Science: Antarctica

New York Academy of Sciences, New York. 7 p.m., 19 September.

How did you become an audio artist?

It was a hobby gone out of control. As a kid I messed around with early Texas Instruments and Commodore 64 computers. My mother made me take violin and double-bass lessons. After college, where I majored in philosophy and French literature, I started DJ'ing to pay my rent, which freed me up for writing and artwork. I began using digital sampling as a kind of musical collage, like the 'cut-up' text technique of Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs.

Why did you go to Antarctica in 2007?

I challenged myself to travel to one of the most remote parts of the planet and make acoustic portraits there. I wanted to confront the recursive logic of weather patterns — rain, snow, ice and wind. So I chartered a decommissioned Russian military icebreaker ship and went to the continent.

Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky. Credit: M. FIGGIS

How did you gather material for Terra Nova?

I carried a compact recording studio in a backpack across the ice. I set up microphones to record the sounds of water and ice, took photographs and distilled a composition from them, mixing electronic edits of the sounds with string arrangements. I wanted to turn weather patterns, which are so complex it takes a supercomputer to model them, into audio-visual compositions. My aim was to convey the idea that, with climate change, some natural variables are no longer meshing.

The Book of Ice

  • Paul D. Miller
Mark Batty: 2011. 128 pp. $29.95

How did The Book of Ice come about?

The book started as a graphical score for the musical piece, inspired by the work of British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew. It grew into a larger project: to condense the complex information about Antarctica into a digestible format using graphic design. String theorist Brian Greene, of Columbia University in New York, wrote a foreword about the physics of ice. And the book includes an infographic on the interactions between different causes of climate change.

What intrigues you about Antarctica?

It is the only continent with no government. One could think of it as a creative commons. A 1959 treaty forbids a military presence. The United States and others have put a huge amount of money into science there, and the research scene has a military feel. Fortunately, the scientists share information with colleagues from other countries.

You have also started an artists' centre on Vanuatu. Why?

The Pacific island of Vanuatu keeps getting ranked as one of the happiest places on Earth. My centre there pulls artists out of the city and slows them down. I've also worked on Nauru, a Pacific dystopia. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Nauru was an offshore banking centre, with billions of dollars passing through daily. It was economically devastated when the money vanished. I made recordings there and used them in a string-quartet composition and visual installation called The Nauru Elegies.

What's next?

My composition Arctic Rhythms is set at the North Pole. I travelled last year to the Svalbard archipelago. There are some 20 million people in the Arctic Circle and about 2,000 in Antarctica. A bigger population makes for a different project: it is about local frameworks, nation states, the international rule of law and the human response to climate change.

What's your view of climate change now?

Economists try to assign a cost to global warming. Yet biologist Richard Dawkins' theory of 'extended phenotype' says that anything an animal makes can be considered an effect of its genes on the environment. So we need to start thinking of climate change as an extension of what it means to be human.