I'll be the first to admit that I'm kind of a jerk. Not to be a complete egomaniac, but I feel like after you've seen some things, traveled a little bit and tried to experience as much as you can, it's really hard after awhile to remember what awe felt like. Not like, "Oh man this frozen yogurt is the best thing I've ever eaten" but more like, "Wow. Humanity is awe inspiring" or "I can't believe that people really do this".
Particularly in an age where everyone is constantly hooked up to their cell phone, Googling what the average age of a great white shark is (it's older than you think) or looking up who the guest star was on SNL was last week (because let's be real, no one watches SNL anymore), it's easy to sometimes forget that you need to look up every now and then to see things. Much less be awed by things. (The two kind of go hand-in-hand.)
So I was intrigued when I read about Doug Aitken in my back issue of Wired Magazine (I'm really behind.) He was introduced to me as "This has been Aitken's subject for 20 years: the rootless geography of today's mobile life. When you check a text message and momentarily disconnect from the world around you, when you wander down an urban street that's alive with LED advertisements, when business travelers forget which city they're in because the hotel rooms all look the same-- that's Aitken territory. As technology has swallowed more and more of our lives, his art has grown in lockstep-- harnessing cutting0edge techniques, fiber optics and servers to turn practically anything into a screen. It's digital art for the digital age. And we need it. We're so surrounded by media it seems banal; Aitken makes it weird again, showing us how beautiful and disquieting our networked world has become."
Even more so when I read what he decided to do: "With "Station to Station", he'll spend three weeks traveling from New York to California aboard a nine-car train filled with visual and musical artists. At each stop they'll have a stage for live performances, bringing out local talent too. His production team will shoot and edit video of each stop, as well as of spontaneous performances on the moving train, and post it all online while they're traveling. Huge displays will show footage Aitken has already shot-- some 200 hours-- of artists across the country talking about their work, the nature of creativity, and how their surroundings influence their work. LED screens affixed to the sides of the tain will broadcast footage out to the landscape-- a moving image that also, well, moves."
I finally caved when I read: "His goal? To make art that's simultaneously physical and virtual, local and global, broadcast using a mashup of the Internet and one of the oldest networks in the US, the steel rails. If "Song1" [another one of his pieces] was liquid architecture, this is practically a plasma. "We're living in a new topography," Aitken says. "Is it possible to be everywhere and nowhere?"
Okay, I got to be honest he lost me a little bit with the weird, "I'm going to talk in paradoxes because I think it makes me more mysterious" thing, but I was still intrigued enough to take a look at his final site with the movies. It's worth checking out if you want to be inspired by the type of artistic, creative souls that are just out there minding their own business-- existing outside your realm of consciousness but steadfastly on the periphery.
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