Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, combines genres and styles to create something new.
(CNN) -- As a living space, Paul D. Miller's Lower Manhattan studio apartment is fairly sparse: futon on the floor, tiny kitchen, couch and a couple chairs, all crammed into a single elongated room overlooking the street. As a repository of information, however, it's something else again.
Along the walls there are shelves and shelves of CDs and DVDs and books, a laptop, audiovisual equipment. Media dominates every free space, whether old-school rap CDs or 1970s foreign films or books about art and philosophy. It is the living space as laboratory, the lair of a multimedia scientist, a place for cutting and shaping and retooling bits and bytes and ideas in an effort to bring forth something new.
Editor's note: This is the third in a weekly series on characteristics of creativity. Part 1 looks at Brian Wilson and passion; part 2 is on Jennifer Egan and the success of failure. Next Saturday's piece will focus on roboticist Heather Knight, intelligence and improvisation.
