Doug Aitken on Black Mirror & Chloë Sevigny

"I wanted to make a work that was an idea or a set of questions as opposed to setting out to make a sculpture, an object or an installation. It was an idea of this kind of present and future, this landscape where everything is shifting and things are borderless, language is shortened, and there’s a sense of perpetual motion. The idea that time was no longer hugely historical, time is something that is always in the present. It’s also the idea of how do you create a story? Do you create a story as a beginning and an end, or is it sometimes possible to have a broader, wider view of something when you see it as a series of fragments. And I felt like the idea of the fictional person we’re creating in the work – I wanted her to be seen in a series of chapters. Some of them more grounded in reality, some of them more hyper real.

I’ve actually known Chloë since our early twenties, and I never thought about anyone else. I had the idea of the philosophy of the work and then I realised I needed a human to become a vehicle to take the viewer into the work, to create a story in some way, some kind of a portrait of a person who’s in this incredible transition and unique world. Chloë was someone I know well, and between us there’s a sense of trust – she could handle such a challenging project. It wasn’t something that was scripted out, it wasn’t something that you could read and approve of in advance – the process of filming, that was the process of the story. It was so fast and aggressive and nomadic and improvisational from place to place and that was what this character should be like.

I see my work as being part of a moving shifting cloud that could be in any place or could be in every place. To me there was a desire to erase the regional and to create more places that are almost of the mind, and places that you almost have a slight déjà vu of, but maybe not… I think there’s a sense of infinite nowness in a way. It is not rooted at all in any sense of nostalgia or collective memory – it is there right now, and it will talk to you."

In the latest work by American artist Doug Aitken, the top floor of the Victoria Miro gallery is taken over by a mirrored hexagonal structure. Upon entering, visitors are transported into an unclarified environment, five flickering screens reflecting over and over into infinite blackness. An expression of relentless motion, Aitken’s film follows a nameless character, played by Chloë Sevigny, on an unexplained, frenetic journey across countries and continents, via plane, car and on foot. The pace is at once breathless and stagnant: phone calls are made yet never answered, planes are seen yet never boarded, motion is constant yet there is no catharsis of arrival. Moments expand, not temporally but literally, as the camera moves slowly away, and Sevigny stares silently back. Sound and rhythms are played with, at once understood as one thing and then seamlessly demonstrated to be an inexplicable other. In the multiple reflections of Sevigny that flash across the mirrors, she interacts only with herself: a kaleidoscope of loneliness reiterating ad infinitum.

For Aitken, the Black Mirror installation entitled is just a single element of the project which he has designed to manifest across multiple formats. First commissioned by the Deste Foundation in Athens, the inaugural performance was a combination of film and live action, with Sevigny on stage performing parts of her role. There is a website with images and quotes from the film; a resource which the artist hopes will allow the work to mutate and grow in the hands of others, in the spirit of the ultra-contemporary nature of the piece.

Doug Aitken is at the Victoria Miro Gallery until November 12 2011. The Altered Earth: Arles, city of moving images App, with artwork by Doug Aitken is available to download here.

Text by Tish Wrigley