Doug Aitken Essay

Doug Aitken was a Multimedia artist who born in 1968 in Redondo Beach, California. He graduated from Pasadena Design Art Center at 1991. Doug Aitken moved to New York at 1994 and held his first exhibition at the 303 gallery there. Aitken’s work forms are widely from photography, sculpture, architectural and all the way to narrative films and sound works. Among them, most of his image works are related to several places and the local culture in those places, such as Guyana’s Jones Town, Africa’s diamond mine and India’s Bollywood and so on. Aitken is keen to deal with the current space and the concept of time, he usually call his own art and installation works as “pure communication.” Doug Aitken currently lives and works in New York with California,
Doug Aitken’s new media work began in the mid-1990s, during this period he began to use multi-screens to create his device works. For example, he created “Diamond Sea” in 1997, this is his first multimedia work- including two image projectors, a display suspended to the celling and a full-color display, inside the present room, four speakers around the room formed a surround sound of experience. In “Diamond Sea,” Doug Aitken took the audience to the center of a no-fly-zone. This art piece was created with a curiosity when Aitken once look at the map at South Africa, he noticed there was a “blank” dot in the map, at further research, the “dot” turned out to be an area of 70,000 square miles, owned by an enterprise, a fully mechanized diamond mine. The mine was simply named “Diamond Area 1 and 2,” it was isolated from outside world since 1980. Doug Aitken eventually spent one month in the mine area. “Diamond Sea” captured those wire mesh, computer-controlled transmission belt, robotic arm and those monitoring systems looking for intruders. In side this mysterious area, the only sign of life in this place are black wild horses, and piles of piles of graves and moving sand. This work was first exhibited at the Whitney Biennale