Born in 1968 in Redondo Beach, California, Doug Aitken studied at Marymount College in Palos Verdes and then the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he received his diploma in 1991. A figure on the Los Angeles art scene since the early 1990s, he focuses his work on our perception of an even more fragmented contemporary society in perpetual acceleration. His technical mastery, combined with a poetic stance, gives rise to imposing, sensual works where narrative gradually gives way to an exploration of notions such as presence, distance and memory. During the 1990s, he turned to the techniques of directing music videos. With The Rockafella Skank (1998) for Fat Boy Slim or The Fear (1999) for µ-ZIQ, he worked within references tied to the music industry and the image of TV culture. At the same time, he showed his first pieces on television screens. In 1992, his film Inflection showed images taken by a camera attached to a rocket, and in 1993, I'd Die for You offered a compilation of the most dramatic moments of John Wayne's films.

A fascination with the forces of nature -- water, lava, the desert – quickly became evident in Aitken's work as he explored the notions of landscape and speed, and especially our relationship to them. One of his main lines of investigation has been our relationship to abandoned landscapes, spaces which are devoid of human beings. In 1998, with Eraser, he chose to film the effects of a volcanic eruption on Monserrat Island the year after the event.

Aitken has always been interested in different kinds of media and has developed numerous collaborations with magazines. An entire part of his work is centred on photography; thus, with the Plateau series (2002-2003), he showed photographic compositions evoking imaginary urban architecture. Exhibit after exhibit, the artist has demonstrated his mastery of the means of presenting the moving image. While they explore different forms and formats for the projection and reception of image and sound, all of his installations are marked by the ability to seize the viewer's attention. Through different works, Airken offers a new way of formulating viewers' relationships to film by giving them the possibility of moving around and totally immersing themselves in the images. Diamond Sea (1997), for example, attempts to reveal the hidden landscape of two diamond mines in Africa. The set-up consists of two video projections, one suspended monitor and one backlit photo in a dark space. Four speakers are used to surround the visitor with a sound experience. The installation Eraser (1998) includes seven large screens occupying a space in which viewers are invited to move about. As in a movie theatre, only the light coming from the films guides the viewers in their displacements. The video installation These Restless Minds (1998) uses three monitors suspended in a circle at eye level and which viewers can watch standing up or seated on one of three benches. The multidiffusion of the sound (the repetitive counting of auctioneers) amplifies the hubbub in the room. In 1999, Aitken won the International Prize of the Venice Biennale with an installation entitled Electric Earth. An eight-screen video set-up allowed visitors to move through a succession of projected images shot in urban settings. Mixing dream and reality, this video installation recreates the itinerary of a man lost in the mechanical sounds of empty streets. Here, the electrified structure of our urban environment is related to the human nervous system. Gradually moving away from his studies of the characteristics of landscapes, he subsequently chose to turn his attention to the people inhabiting them. In these works he attempted to show that technological progress not only changes the materials and objects we live with but also alters our notions of speed, space and time. The installation New Skin (2002), for example, explores in a fictional way the relationship between our senses of sight and sound (and the way they are conceived) and memory. Here, the technical set-up consisted of four-channel video projections onto an elliptical X-screen. Aitken shows human beings confronted with multiple experiences in a constant coming and going between private and public space, solitude and social practices. He juxtaposes elements of the world, of daily life, on the basis of a pre-determined concept. The resulting kaleidoscope becomes an attempt to grasp the world as it is in its totality and simultaneity, without commentary.

In 2005, Aitken had his first solo exhibit in Paris, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Three installations were incorporated into a vast stage-like structure resembling a shooting set which thus delimited a space proper to fiction. Moving from darkness into light, visitors entered a circuit which they could modify at any time, interrupting the linearity, inventing their own script and thus becoming the very subjects of the exhibit.

Laetitia Rouiller