We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.

Doug Aitken

Categorized in : New Short Art History

When you make work, the concept is the basis for it; all choices of aesthetics or mediums come later.

Doug Aitken

mediums bases choices

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

Doug Aitken

used simple ideas

In sound design programs now, you can literally sculpt the sound on visual graphs. Sometimes the visual programs are even more interesting than the music that's making them

Doug Aitken

design sound interesting

Our culture is just too comfortable in creating these kind of divisions between culture.

Doug Aitken

kind culture

I am fascinated by the indecisive moment and the peripheral view.

Doug Aitken

indecisive moments views

Divisions between culture is not this precious thing, it's just this dirty beehive with things moving around, creating accidents, and violence, and harmony. It's this kind of beautiful mess, this matter.

Doug Aitken

beautiful dirty moving

I think the idea of embracing the process, creating something, no matter how thin it is, that you can call a starting point - whether it's a word or it's an idea, or it's a little piece of narrative that you might base a film on - starting that journey of making the work. That's also something that every individual does very differently.

Doug Aitken

film journey thinking

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

Doug Aitken

kind

The compartmentalizing is so severe, that we kind of lose track. When you sit down to dinner with friends, you're going to talk about everything, sharing this polyphony of experiences, this spectrum of culture, and it's all cross-pollinating all the time.

Doug Aitken

track kind culture

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.

Doug Aitken

musician architecture thinking

I'm not a journalist; I'm probably a horrible interviewer. The one small thing I have is I'm curious, and I'm interested in who I'm with.

Doug Aitken

journalist curious horrible

I try to just put a blank stage in front of them, and say, "This is your space; you tell me where you're coming from and where you're going." At a certain point, it was interesting as the project started to become what it is now, The Source, which has a physical installation and also an online presence. As we started building the installation, I started thinking, "It's really strange that we're building this installation, this piece of architecture you can go into." It's almost strange because I suppose it's an artwork, but it's an artwork that's really constructed out of ideas.

Doug Aitken

trying interesting thinking

What The Source becomes, in a physical sense, is almost like this particle accelerator. There's all these different, discrete voices and ideas. If you just saw two of them together perhaps it might seem completely diverse and like, "Why do you have these two people together?" But as it grows and as it speeds up, it kind of creates a larger dialogue.

Doug Aitken

different together people

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.

Doug Aitken

landscape communication world moving

There's really no differentiation between the work I make and the world I live in.

Doug Aitken

live make work world

My office has two buildings that function like the right and left sides of the brain. There's a room where everything is being edited for an upcoming project, but you can pull out of that into a tranquil space to work in a different, more solitary medium. It's an architectural unfolding of the process instead of just one chaotic structure.

Doug Aitken

you space brain work

I'm really a believer in being in situations that feel new and awkward and different. And I love that feeling of being in motion - that sense you find when you're traveling.

Doug Aitken

feel feeling you love

It's very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present.

Doug Aitken

lose you environment easy

The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.

Doug Aitken

short nature song travel

We are engaging with so many art forms at once in the 21st century, but we're presented with them in a way that is so isolated.

Doug Aitken

them 21st-century way art