Doug Aitken
1968–
Artist 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 sleepwalkers (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.
Aitken’s earlier landmark project electric earth, 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. electric earth’s 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.
Introduction
Doug Aitken (born 1968) is an American multidisciplinary artist. Aitken's body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. He currently lives in Venice, California, and New York City.
Wikidata identifier
Q2419774
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 8, 2025.
Introduction
Known for his video projects focusing on the themes of entropy and abandoned landscape; also a director of music videos; included in the 2000 and 1997 Whitney Biennial exhibitions as well as the 48th Venice Beinnale.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, installation artist, painter, video artist
ULAN identifier
500114566
Names
Doug Aitken
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 8, 2025.
