He came, he spun, he ran out the room quickly to catch a flight. DJ Spooky swept through Fargo last week, perhaps similarly to the way he sweeps across the world on a pretty regular basis. The 44-year-old DJ, whose real name is Paul D. Miller, says he has many titles: artist, writer, film producer. He spends his time performing DJ gigs around the world, making music out of melting ice data, creating the DJ Spooky app that has over 15 million downloads, and most recently, writing a book about apps.

His work in software prompted him to dig deeper into the world of apps and how they affect digital creativity. He shared a message at 1 Million Cups recently about the result of his diggings: a book he wrote in conjunction with MIT, called The Imaginary App.

“Software is not dead,” he said from the stage. “It’s not cold. It’s a new pallet for artists.”

Though his stay was short, I was able to catch Spooky and his friend Julian for lunch at the HoDo on a warm Tuesday afternoon. Here are a few thoughts he shared about mobile apps and how they are changing the world.

DJ Spooky and the Imaginary App

EP: What was your motivation behind writing The Imaginary App?

Apps are now really embedded in pretty much every aspect of modern life. Your car is an app, basically. How you control your home is through different apps. How your cell phone navigates around you is an app.

There hadn’t been a book about that so I wanted to figure out a clever way to embody that, and make that happen. I published with MIT about art and technology. I’ve been wanting to do a book on that. I gathered together various artists, developers, creatives, and we made a mega mix.

My favorite essay is one by Nole Gordon, the guy who invented Google Maps.

EP: What initially drew you to software from the life of a DJ? What motivated you to create the app?

Well, everything in modern life is getting more digital. Your cell phone has more computational power than half of the American Space Program in the late 1960’s. I was thinking about that from the point of music, and networks, and sound, and I said ‘you know, the next wave is going to be mobile everything.’

EP: In the book description, it says the contributors vary in their opinion on mobile apps, calling them both a “gaping wound” or “promise of possibility.” What is your personal opinion on mobile apps?

This is where startups really are incredibly important in the ecosystem right now. For example, Uber, or Airbnb – people didn’t know that they wanted a new form of getting cars. All of these are very highly successful, niche apps or software. They fulfill a need that people didn’t know that they had. That’s what makes them scale so huge, so quickly.

If you’re developing an app, like my DJ mixing app, we’ve had 15 million downloads. But it’s free, so it’s not the most commercial thing I could’ve done. 15 million sounds like a lot, but Angry Birds had like a billion.

EP: Was the success of your DJ Spooky app a factor in the creation of your book?

Oh, absolutely. It’s when I realized that people would download and check out all sorts of different things online. Any physical object that you can have, you can then make an app. So if you need a taxi, you make the Uber app, if you need a home, you have all sorts of apps.

EP: Why did you call the book The Imaginary App?

It’s about apps that don’t exist yet. The whole book was written on apps, and cell phones and tablets. So I wanted to make a book about apps that had people re-imagine what an app could be. It’s conceptual.

I even did an exhibition where I asked the artists to come out with app designs for things that don’t exist. So we’ve had a good run with it.

EP: If you could create any app, what kind of app would you create?

Well, writing a book about apps is kind of paradoxical because apps are digital and books are physical. So probably my next batch of apps are going to be looking at literary and art style. So I’ll be doing a book about digital fictions – that’s my next book with MIT.

And then, I would make an app that lets you think about photography in a storytelling medium. Where you come up with different ideas around how, when you see an image, what story is going through it. But Google’s kind of already doing that, they have Storify. It algorithmically traces through all your photography and puts it together.

EP: In your book do you address the fickle nature of ‘going viral’?

It’s actually pretty algorithmic. Everything is patterns. The world around us is just patterns. If it wasn’t Uber it’d be something else, about using cell phones to get cars. I think that Uber really hit the mark so well, that it really changed the whole game. Same with Airbnb. It’s just about getting the right push at the right time.

EP: Do you see any negative sides to the rise of mobile apps?

Mhm. People are spending less and less time as human beings. They’re just dealing with this digital medium. It’s eerie because it also creates a whole new sense of human – you know, it’s quantifiable. When you think about, if you are actually a whole bunch of numbers, what makes you…you?

… Most people are looking at the business of the stuff. They’re looking at how to make money, how to set up a startup, how to think about the implications of the finances of a company. That’s what apps are. As much as possible, I wanted to get people to think about how an app isn’t just a business dynamic, it’s more about ideas, native to code.

 

Thanks DJ Spooky. Thoughts, responses, more questions? Leave us a comment!

Photos courtesy of DJ Spooky.