Doug Aitken: 100 YRS

Fragmentation, environments, technology, motion...the preoccupations of artist Doug Aitken are many and varied. He has been working for more than twenty years, his practice ranging across handheld video footage and luscious cinematography featuring Hollywood stars, in complex soundscapes and site specific earthworks, in gallery installations and nomadic happenings. But what determines the artist as unique is not simply the scope and inspiration of his works, but the densely crafted web of thoughts and inspirations from which they emerge.

A retrospective work 100 YRS, published by Rizzoli, explores the ever increasing pool of Aitken's creativity through images, essays by admirers and peers, and his own words – thoughts and statements taken from the series of interviews he has done over many years with AnOther Contributing Editor Hans Ulrich Obrist. Here AnOther presents extracts from these interviews – Aitken's musings on the changing face of landscapes and digitisation of our world – alongside an exclusive film of the Sonic Fountain element of his 2013 exhibition at 303 Gallery.

Altered Earth
“We’re moving into an era when things are dematerialised and much more holographic. Floating above the physical world and the geographic map there’s another landscape, that’s constantly changing – something like a cloud – of communication, information, exchange and commerce. In this landscape, language is reduced to electronic pulses; experiences are boiled down to single images; and human exchanges are often short, fleeting messages. This digital world is as much a landscape as the physical world, but, in a sense, it still exists completely outside the act of traditional mapping. A map is usually something that defines physical geography; it defines systems and boundaries. We’re in the process of redefining what landscape is and how to map it.”

This is the Only Now I Get
“We are definitely experiencing time in a different way now in terms of information. We move rapidly through information, grazing across the surface, comfortable in an accelerated state. In turn, in the moments when we stop and turn everything off, we find ourselves alone in an almost greater silence.”

Liquid Architecture
“I think about museums often. There are things that I want museums to do that they often don’t. For me, I like it when there’s a system within the museum that can continuously change – whether it’s a museum that is nomadic or one that’s designed so the building can shape-shift. I like restless spaces and I want to be engaged.”

The Passenger
“In our daily lives we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living.”

Doug Aitken: 100 YRS is out now, published by Rizzoli.