Still from "Sleepwalkers" credit: doug aitken
You might remember Doug Aitken's New York exhibition "Sleepwalkers" from 2007 (trailer, documantary and essay)!? Five interlocking vignettes shown through eight projections were displayed upon the exterior walls of the MoMa so as to be visible from the street. During a live piece the projections were shown on the walls at the same time as live drummers and auctioneers chants. The monumental project stared actors Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, musicians Seu Jorge and Cat Power, and actor/street drummer Ryan Donowho.
"Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers is a continuation of Aitken’s exploration into the evolving ways people experience their daily environment. He aims to visualize their perceptions, connect personally private and socially shared experiences and relate them to fast-paced urban environments [...] In structuring his work to slip into viewers’ media-saturated cultural unconscious, he seeks to allow them to experience cinematic imagery in a new way. Dismantling the linkages between narrative sequences, isolating sound, moving images, and the rhythms of our surroundings, he engages in an overarching practice of multimedial experimentation." source
At art basel Doug Aitken is represented by New York based 303 Gallery showing a video art work of a motel which has strangely been occupied by several wild animals. This work seems to be some kind of extension to his sleepwalkers as it definitely is another way to point out people's experience of their daily environments. In resemblance to Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys you for example see a buffalo scratching its head on a motel bed. Many slow tracking shots paying attention to several everyday items and situation, like a telephone on a desk or the surface of the swimming pool's water etc. and nothing's really happening. The animals simly are there. A rabbit, a fox, a buffalo...
While searching the web I discovered a video by LCD Soundsystem directed by Doug Aitken that pretty much shows the way his videos are like:
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