world rush_4 artists
Doug Aitken

interiors, 2002, is Doug Aitken’s most recent major work in which several separate stories unfold in very different locations around the globe, woven together by sound and rhythm. Aitken explains his environmental films in the following way: ‘I didn’t want that glass barrier of the single screen – that frame, like a painting. I wanted to see if it was possible to blow that open and create a space of pure content and communication, without those anchors. I found myself looking for situations or concepts that I could pull into a space, that would become the DNA for something more sensory and less narrative in the traditional sense’.

interiors moves from an eerie, white, helicopter factory to an American ghetto, then onto the streets of Tokyo, following several anonymous people. As Aitken says, ‘In some respects, it’s an exploration of chaos theory, where you have these people moving through situations that are very random, where they’re bombarded by different things from their environment, and then the piece reaches a point where, suddenly, all the stories link up very tightly and very quickly and create this unified composition. And the piece becomes denser and tighter and accelerates more and more until a point where it just snaps’

Low-key and pensive in mood, interiors expands the isolation of watching into a much more subjective and enveloping environmental experience that is also strategically stuttered, looped and fragmented. Aitken reorders our understanding of networked time, space and narrative.