Landscapes and Change [VIDEO]

Michael Kurcfeld checks in with multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken about two recent projects.

By Michael KurcfeldMarch 21, 2025

• Art & Architecture

ARTIST DOUG AITKEN came to international prominence with Electric Earth in 1999. A mesmerizing multiscreen video installation, the work won the International Prize at the Venice Biennale and was a sensation at the Whitney Biennial the following year. The viewer is surrounded by screens, across which play out rhythmic and fractured scenes of a young man moving through a nocturnal Los Angeles. “A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what’s around me,” the protagonist says.

Across a great variety of media and genres—in addition to film and video installation, he works in sculpture, photography, and site-specific and architectural interventions of various kinds—an interest in movement and place, so pronounced in Electric Earth, has been a hallmark of Aiken’s work throughout his career. His Station to Station project (2013) saw Aitken transform a train into a nomadic performance platform and kinetic light sculpture, as it made its way from New York to San Francisco, making stops at key points along the way. For New Horizon (2019), he created a reflective hot-air balloon that traveled across Massachusetts, creating site-specific happenings at each landing. His video installations survey the landscapes and crumbling built environment of the American West (HOWL, 2023), the frenetic energy of Bollywood studios (Into the Sun, 1999), and Arctic vistas and melting glaciers (New Ocean, 2001), drawing on aspects of the music video format and Hollywood films to create moody and immersive experiences. 

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lightscape (2024) is Aitken’s latest film installation. Following its premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall in November 2024, the work was installed at the Marciano Art Foundation, where it hosted weekly musical performances. Lightscape sees Aitken return once again to Los Angeles and Southern California, with a sequence of disconnected scenes that feel like they might have come from a movie you saw, or dreamed, long ago— evoking ennui, cliché, and romance, at once familiar and strange. Simultaneously, Aitken opened the exhibition Psychic Debris Field at Regen Projects in Hollywood, featuring a series of light boxes and sculptures that juxtaposed organic and synthetic materials. Depicting buffalo, mountain lions, and cacti alongside aging icons of material culture, the show continued Aitken’s exploration of the American West as both physical territory and narrative space.

LARB caught up with him to discuss the two projects and more. 

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Text by LARB Staff. Video by Michael Kurcfeld.