Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken
Aitken's Sleepwalkers displayed at the Museum of Modern Art 2007
Born	1968 (1968) Redondo Beach, California
Nationality	American
Known for	Multimedia art

Doug Aitken is an American multimedia artist.

Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968. In 1987, he initially studied magazine illustration with Philip Hays at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before graduating in Fine Arts in 1991. He moved to New York in 1994 where he had his first solo show at 303 Gallery. He currently lives and works in Venice, California, and New York.

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. Aitken's video works have taken place in such culturally loaded sites as Jonestown in Guyana, Africa's diamond mines, and India's Bollywood.

Aitken has created an array of site-specific installations, sometimes synthesizing interactive media with architecture. A recent site-specific work is Underwater Pavilions (2016), which consist of three temporary sculptures that were moored to the ocean floor off Catalina Island, CA. Geometric in design, the sculptures created environments that reflected and refracted light, opening a portal that physically connected a viewer to the expanse of the ocean while simultaneously disrupting preconceived visual ideas of the aquatic world. By merging the language of contemporary architecture, land art, and ocean research and conservation, the Underwater Pavilions were a living artwork within a vibrant ecosystem. In contrast to areas of the sculpture that have a rough and rock-like surface, mirrored sections reflected the seascape and, when approached, activated to become a kaleidoscopic observatory. The environments created by the sculptures changed and adjusted with the currents and time of day, focusing the attention of the viewer on the rhythm of the ocean and its life cycles. The artwork created a variety of converging perceptual encounters that played with the fluidity of time and space, resulting in a heightened awareness of the physical world. The sculptures were created in partnership with Parley for the Oceans and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Another site-specific project, titled Mirage, will premiere at Desert X, near Palm Springs, CA from February 25 - April 30, 2017.

Since the mid-1990s, Aitken has created installations by employing multiple screens in architecturally provocative environments. diamond sea (1997), for example, includes three video projections, one suspended video monitor, and one full-color, illuminated transparency photograph in a dimly lit space. Multiple speakers create an immersive sound experience; the multi-screen film explores a guarded region in the Namib desert in southwestern Africa known as Diamond Area 1 and 2. The territory, estimated at over 40,000 square miles and sealed off since 1908, contains the world’s largest and richest computer-controlled diamond mine.Hysteria (1998–2000) uses film footage from the past four decades that shows audiences at pop and rock concerts working themselves into a frenzy on four screens in an X formation. Filmed and photographed in the dusty sound stages and film sets of Bombay, Into the Sun (1999) focuses on the frenetic activity of Bollywood, recreating the sound stages of the Indian film industry with canvas projection screens, a red dirt floor, and video shown in a non-stop, twenty-four-hour loop.diamond sea was presented at the 1997 Whitney Biennial and his electric earth installation, an eight projection, multi-room post cinematic experience, drew international attention and earned him the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. His ambitious show New Ocean, which included multiple sound, photo, and video works, began with a transformation of the Serpentine Gallery in London and traveled the world to Austria, Italy and Japan, each time in a new configuration. In 2010, Aitken exhibited his work House, a study of destruction featuring the artist's parents.