{"data":{"id":"5513","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":5513,"topgoose_id":27,"tms_id":5513,"display_name":"Doug Aitken","sort_name":"Aitken Doug","display_date":"1968–","begin_date":"1968","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eArtist Doug Aitken works across a range of mediums that include single- and multichannel video, film, live performance, sound, photography, and architectural intervention. His projects have engaged diverse geographical and cultural sites, from diamond mines in southwestern Africa to India’s Bollywood. Aitken is well known for his large-scale indoor and outdoor video installations that transform physical spaces through complex narratives and viewing experiences. His cinematic project \u003cem\u003esleepwalkers\u003c/em\u003e (2007), for example, consisted of five interconnected stories that were displayed as eight projections onto the exterior walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and explored the nocturnal urban landscape by following five inhabitants of the city—a bike messenger, a postal worker, an office worker, an electrician, and a businessman.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAitken’s earlier landmark project \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/12729\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eelectric earth\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, which earned him the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, already explored this type of new cinematic form in a multiroom installation. The protagonists of electric earth are both the anonymous urban landscape and the lone dancer who traverses it, responding to its rhythms of blinking traffic lights and automatic car windows and fusing psychological and topographical states: “A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what’s around me,” the protagonist says. \u003cem\u003eelectric earth’s\u003c/em\u003e fusion of dancer and urban wasteland constructs an environment that in turn implicates viewers, who must move through and immerse themselves in it to experience the work. Aitken visually achieves this fusion by expertly merging the vocabularies of narrative cinema, music video, and dance, choreographing a cityscape that is as alienating as it is seductive.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500114566","wikidata_id":"Q2419774","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:26:46.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-09T07:00:35.858-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/5513/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/5513/exhibitions"}}}}