Born: 1968, Redondo Beach, California
Lives and Works: Los Angeles

Doug Aitken's art is concerned with stimuli and stories that are asynchronous and fractured. Through the orchestration of multiscreen moving-image installations he has frequently touched on themes of urban isolation, emotional alienation, and expansive natural wilderness. The "characters" he directs—whether humans, machines, animals, or landscapes—often exhibit uncanny behaviors or communicate in strange statements, lending Aitken's immersive audiovisual environments the sense of an unfolding waking dream. Characteristically using up to a dozen or more projectors, monitors, and speakers, Aitken delivers a multimedia experience for our time that suggests a separate category, somewhere between cinema and architectural sculpture. Migration (2008) is an odyssey through a contemporary American landscape of seemingly abandoned hotels and motels. Encompassing executive airport suites and desolate, nondescript inns inhabited, or haunted, by mammals and birds indigenous to the American West, Migration's sequences evoke a scenario in which places of temporary human habitation are confronted with instinctive and wild forces.

Links: Doug Aitken Workshop