Film Forum

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Metallica, Chuck D, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono. His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013. In 2014, he was named National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He produced Pioneers of African American Cinema, a collection of the earliest films made by African American directors, released in 2015. Miller’s artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.

Ina Archer, who served as consultant to this series, is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer and writer whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally including at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Maysles Cinema, New York; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. Archer was a studio artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow, and a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and she has been awarded numerous residencies. She is a Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and the former co-chair of New York Women in Film & Television Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Ina was on faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. She is a contributor to Film Comment magazine, as well as other film periodicals and three blogs (Continuum Film Blog, Black Leader, Ina’s Horror Blog). Archer received a BA in Film/Video from RISD and an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU focused on race, preservation, technology, and early sound film.

Supported by a Humanities New York Action Grant