WASHINGTON, DC.- Irvine Contemporary announced the representation of Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky). Our first project is an artist’s edition of Miller’s video and music composition, New York is Now, which was selected for the African Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. A set of photographic prints from video stills will accompany the new edition of the video.

The new edition of New York is Now will premier in December 2007 in Miami during the ArtBasel/Miami week at the Scope Art Fair and a VIP screening at the Rubell Family Collection, which will feature a talk by the artist. A gallery exhibition is being planned at Irvine Contemporary for spring 2008.

New York is Now - Originally created for the Luanda Triennial in 2006, Paul D. Miller’s video and music composition, New York is Now, is a response to the conditions that art reflects in the 21st century’s fast paced and completely networked global culture. Miller has long been at home on the global scene of digital culture—as an artist, musician, and writer—and his work has focused on urban culture as the globally interconnected platform for the production processes of digital media. Using archival footage and early avant-garde cinema mixed with his own music, Miller composes New York is Now as an exploration of memory through the interplay of images and sounds, creating a digital multimedia opera about a city made of improvisations, disjunctions, overlapping histories, and multiple rhythms. The multiple visual sources of New York is Now appear as historical analogues for the uses of technology in today’s art practices. Films in Miller’s compositional mix include Man Ray’s Dadist “cinepoems,” Situationist architect Constant’s “Manifesto for a New Babylon,” Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema,” Méliès “L’homme orchestre,” Thomas Edison’s early film of the first use of electric lights on Coney Island, George Antheil’s “Ballet Mechanique,” and many other sources ranging from the first avant-garde cinema to found footage of New York history. The Coney Island electric light sequence from the Edison film provides a fascinating representation of technology and spectacle, which we now experience in all digital media. Appropriating the self-reflexive and lyrical expressions of the visual technology of early cinema, Miller rechannels past and present into a new work for today’s post-digital scene of video and music.