Doug Aitken

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.

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.

Doug Aitken was born in 1968 in Redondo Beach, California.

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.

Since the mid-1990s, Aitken has created installations by employing multiple screens in architecturally provocative environments.

He moved to New York in 1994 where he had his first solo show at 303 Gallery.

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, southwest 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, New Horizon, revolved around a reflective hot air balloon and gondola that transformed into a kinetic light sculpture.

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.

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.

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.

In 1998, Glass Horizon, an installation comprising a projection of a pair of eyes onto the facade of the Vienna Secession building after it had closed for the night, showcased an interest in architectural structures and in art that interacts with urban environments.

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.

In 2001, Aitken's exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery used the entire building for the complex installation New Ocean including transforming the museum's tower into a functional lighthouse at night.

In 2004, after having worked together in Berlin, Doug Aitken and Klaus Biesenbach co-curated Hard Light, a group exhibition at MoMA PS1.

In the winter of 2007, Aitken's large-scale installation Sleepwalkers, curated by Klaus Biesenbach in collaboration with Creative Time, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The project included actors such as Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, as well as musicians Seu Jorge and Cat Power.

Five interlocking vignettes shown through eight projections were displayed upon the exterior walls of the museum so as to be visible from the street.

Concurrent with the exhibition, Aitken also presented a "happening" inside the museum that featured live drummers and auctioneers, and a performance by Cat Power.

In the same year, he created an interactive music table: "k-n-o-c-k-o-u-t".

In 2008, Aitken produced another large scale outdoor film installation, titled Migration for the 55th Carnegie International show titled "Life on Mars" in Pittsburgh, PA. The first installment in a three-part trilogy entitled Empire, the work features migratory wild animals of North America as they pass through and curiously inhabit empty and desolate hotel rooms.

In 2010, Aitken exhibited his work House, a study of destruction featuring the artist's parents.

Another project was Underwater Pavilions (2016), which consisted 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, premiered at Desert X, near Palm Springs, CA from February 25 to April 30, 2017, and evolved with presentations in Detroit, MI, as Mirage Detroit (2018), and Switzerland as Mirage Gstaad (2019).

In 2017, the artist displayed a three channel video installation titled Underwater Pavilions at Art Basel Unlimited, documenting sculptures of the same name.

Aitken has shown NEW ERA, a kaleidoscopic multi-channel video installation in a mirrored hexagonal room, in various locations across the world, from New York to Zurich, Denmark, Beijing, California and London.

The artwork maps the creation of the cellular telephone into a landscape of repetition and philosophical reckoning with its effect on the world.

In 2023 in Zürich, he showed a five-channel video installation titled HOWL where "oil derricks spot the rolling, sun-bleached hills of a desolate valley in central California while plywood boards shutter local stores. Interspersed within these depictions of wide-open spaces, residents provide soundbites on the circumstances of living in this dying town. They tell of their hopes for the area, its oil-boom history, their lives and the wider future."

The balloon sculpture was featured in a series of happenings that took place in July 2019 across the state of Massachusetts.