Round concrete, and mostly windowless, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, resembles a huge carousel for an old-school slide projector. But in the spring of 2012, it looked considerably different: It became a huge, cylindrical computer monitor. California artist Doug Aitken had turned the entire building into a massive 13,444- by 1,080-pixel art installation.
As night fell, a set of 11 precisely synced, high-intensity movies covered the surface of the Hirshhorn in a single, continuously looping 35-minute film. In Aitken’s piece, called Song1, dozens of eclectic characters—a young female worker in a factory, a set of women in choir robes, a man driving at night—sang the Tin Pan Alley classic “I Only Have Eyes for You.” In between versions of the song, Aitken intercut spooky, pretty images of isolation and technology: A silhouetted woman walking through an empty parking lot, cars racing along a highway at night, a reel-to-reel tape machine.
Crowds gathered in the National Mall to wander around the building and see the whole thing. Like many of Aitken’s works, it felt like a monument—both majestic and unsettling—to our iPhone-and-flatscreen-TV-bedecked modern world of high-tech distractions and connections. It gave viewers a gentle “fear of missing out”: They couldn’t see all of it at once, so they had to walk its periphery, knowing they weren’t seeing the whole. It was a crooning love ballad, yet its characters were mostly alone, never interacting, constantly traveling but never arriving. It was a museum exhibit you visited, sure, but inside out. “I wanted the building to disappear,” Aitken says. A lot of his work has this effect; he calls it liquid architecture.
This has been Aitken’s subject for the past 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 cutting-edge techniques, fiber optics, and servers to turn practically anything into a screen. It’s digital art for a 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.
New technologies always transform art—the way it’s made and what it’s made about. When oil paint first came out in tin tubes in the mid-19th century, artists could suddenly carry a much wider array of paints into the field, and brighter ones too. The innovation helped usher in a new era of outdoor scenes and made them riotously colorful—hallmarks of Impressionism. In the late 19th century, the camera produced a startling new style of vision: Eadweard Muybridge’s freeze-frames captured unseen details of how human and animal bodies moved, while Edward Weston later celebrated the “photographic eye,” the way film and light exposure helped him perceive new details in the world around him. Joanne McNeil, a digital art critic and former editor of the Rhizome art blog, puts it best: “Technology provides us with new ways of looking at things.”
This transformation is happening again—except this time with digital tools. In the past half-century, technology has endowed us with crazy new modes of perception and creation: satellites, digital cameras and filters, CAD, 3-D printing, Google. These are the new center of gravity for emerging art. The latest generation of artists has grown up with their lives brokered on social networks, recorded by omnipresent cameras, sorted via search algorithms, connected instantly across hemispheres—a life full of behavioral nudging and corporate logic. Like Aitken, they’re not just talking about the effects of all this technology. They’re using the technology itself as the clay for their art—producing works made of code that run in your browser, on Google Maps, on videogame systems. This is a scene where art is made out of everything from Facebook to satellite feeds. The UK writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle has called it simply the New Aesthetic.
This fall Aitken is wrapping all these themes together in a particularly audacious project—one that spans nearly a century of technology. 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 train cars will broadcast footage out to the landscape—a moving image that also, well, moves.
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 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?”
When I first meet Aitken, he’s eating pizza in the kitchen area of his elegant modernist studio in Venice, California. It’s decorated with his previous work, including a series of text sculptures: The word ART, crafted out of 2-foot-high cracked glass, looms in the sitting area nearby, while SEX hangs on the wall outside, made of clear plastic letters filled with green desert plants. Even the furniture is art: Aitken and I are seated at a wooden “sonic table” he designed, which has carved areas on its surface that produce various notes when struck, like a marimba. “I had this guy out in the desert make it for me,” he says excitedly, rapping a few notes with his knuckles and encouraging me to try it out. “They’re sculpted hollow on the underside, like spoons!”
Aitken is 45, a tall, blue-eyed Californian possessed of a deeply chill West Coast vibe, complete with a vaguely surferish drawl. Ironically, he himself has an almost monastic relationship to our digital world (no Twitter, no Instagram, a Facebook page with a mere five posts—all from 2011). Yet he has created some of the most powerful modern commentaries on technology. Famous in the elite world of fine art, he’s an unabashed romantic for the messy, silly power of face-to-face interaction: Aitken often unveils one of his artworks with a “happening” straight out of the 1960s, a show incorporating everything from thrashing punk bands to auctioneers to pole dancers to professional whip-crackers.
When he talks, he leans in, intense and focused; his iPhone sits on the table, but he never peeks at it. (On the back he has taped two handwritten reminders: “Call Jeff Tweedy” and “Call Patti Smith.”) “In a weird way it’s replaced a lot of photography that I used to do,” he says of the phone. “I used to carry a medium-format camera with me everywhere I went, like a Pentax, and that was just part of my body.” He got so used to it that his posture changed to accommodate the strap.
As a child, Aitken made art from everything he could get his hands on. “If I could do a drawing, I did it. If I could use a found object, I did it. I didn’t think of myself in a genre. If I could find chemicals in the garage to put on a picture, I would,” he says. He studied illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, then graduated into the recession of 1991, when money in the art world collapsed. Aitken moved to New York City “totally broke,” he says. “I had this insanely shitty studio with no windows or heating or cooling. And I knew one guy in New York. I tried to make a new work every 10 days. I was just knocking out these pieces.” The age of “big paintings” was ending in a poof of evaporated Wall Street money, but the vacuum was freeing: It meant everything was up for grabs. “It kind of bred a DIY ethic,” Aitken says. At about the same time, artists started exploring new media, which was becoming common and cheaper in the early 1990s: Bruce Nauman’s looping video installations, Nam June Paik’s video art.
Soon Aitken became known for his own daring visual exploits, using video to resee the world in strange, unsettling ways. In 1992 he launched a rocket over San Diego with a small camera pointing down, then displayed the footage in extreme slow motion, suburbs beginning as asphalt in close-up, slowly turning into remote, abstract patterns. From there Aitken began projecting onto bigger and bigger screens. He wanted people to be inside his videos, as though they were works of architecture. The breakout came with 1999’s Electric Earth, a 15-minute film in which a young protagonist wanders through a suburban nightscape of empty parking lots and airports, twitching in a jittery dance as if energized—or agitated—by his surroundings. Aitken projected various parts on eight screens arranged in three rooms so viewers had to assemble the whole thing in their minds.
His ambitions grew more and more epic. In his 2007 work, Sleepwalkers, Aitken projected a movie as a series of seven related scenes displayed on six outside walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Song1, in Washington, required precise synchronization of 11 projectors to produce the flowing wraparound image. If one got out of time with the others, it would have wrecked the sense that you were looking at a single screen. Aitken had to control all the projectors with three central servers connected via 41,500 feet of fiber-optic cable.
With such huge images, Aitken needed his actors and shots to move slowly and gracefully. And he had to use bright, luminous imagery, says Josh Weisberg, whose firm, WorldStage—specialists in huge projections—collaborated on the projects. “If you’re going to do outdoor projections, don’t use Ingmar Bergman’s style as your model, because it won’t work,” he says. As with paint and tubes, the technologies shaped the art.
One of the threads that connects today’s digital artists is the struggle to make our daily technologies seem strange and unusual again. A century ago Modernists became captivated by the city, alternately fascinated and repelled by the rise of urban life, global war, and industrial forces in an environment that was simultaneously intimate and alienating. T. S. Eliot turned fragments of overheard experience into the sensory pastiche of The Waste Land; Piet Mondrian visualized New York as a pared-down overhead grid, a sort of pre-satellite vision.
For today’s digital artists, the code and algorithms we live in present a similar frontier. They’re our new environment, offering us striking new experiences and abilities. As James Bridle points out, using something as prosaic as the location check-in app Foursquare requires a feat of superhuman sensing—pinging GPS satellites launched into space by the military—that is frankly sort of nuts if you think about it. Yet generally we don’t think about it. So the unifying thread of the new digital artists is to make us notice our technological environment—to enable us to scrutinize the digital furniture of our lives instead of just sinking into it. Aitken blazed the way with video, making our glimmering LCD screens seem uncanny. The new generation of digital artists coming in his wake are going one step further: They’re not just using our daily tools to make art. They’re turning it into a ubiquitous gallery.
Consider Brooklyn artist Molly Dilworth , who’s done a series she calls Paintings for Satellites. She painted seven huge abstract works on the roofs of buildings in New York and Kansas and then waited for weeks or months until they showed up on Google Earth. When you look at the pictures—most of which are still visible online—you realize with a shock precisely how bionic online maps make us. It’s human vision streaming through satellites. “When we’re on our phones, we’re looking through satellites,” she tells me. Sure, the paintings are lovely and witty. But they’re also disturbing, because the mere act of viewing them makes you feel like you’re spying, which is precisely the point.
Another artist, photographer Doug Rickard , turned the other end of Google’s magnification range into something similarly discomforting. Seeing all the people inadvertently captured on Street View, he realized the Google camera car had an aesthetic all its own. “You’ve got a height, and you’ve got a wide-angle lens,” he says, and “you’ve got people who don’t really know they’re being photographed.” The car grabs scenes that a photographer couldn’t, or wouldn’t, think to shoot. It “just went along and photographed people democratically,” Rickard says. “And I hijacked that.”
Rickard spent four years sifting through Street Views of dilapidated neighborhoods for a show called A New American Picture. The blurred-out faces give his work a double-edged meaning: They’re Google’s attempt to preserve privacy, yet they wind up accentuating “these feelings of economic isolation and separation,” he says: a man in shredded jeans walking past a heavily tagged wall, a young girl standing in front of her bungalow, staring right at the lens. Once you’ve seen it, you never look at Google Maps quite the same way again. Interestingly, Rickard doesn’t think he could repeat it, because Google now uses higher-resolution cameras. He prefers the fuzzier images from the old vehicles. “They were like Hopper paintings,” he says.
Indeed, lo-res has its own allure. The quirky, fuzzy errors in our software and online experiences have given birth to what’s known as glitch art, works that explore the occasionally expressive beauty of malfunctioning tech. In 2007 Petra Cortright—a 27-year-old visual artist in California—began editing hypnotically weird videos of herself that played up the strange glitches of YouTube. A video would begin with the classic “hey, look at me” laptop-cam shot. But after a few seconds, odd distortions would creep in. Cortright’s arms would elongate, her hair would chunkily pixelate, sections of the frame would seem to move faster than other parts. It became a riveting meditation on YouTube and self-presentation: How much humanity can we express in tiny, janky cubes of video? In tweets? Status updates?
Given the centrality of social networking in our everyday lives, it’s probably not surprising that Facebook has spawned a pile of art scrutinizing its effects. One of the more powerful works is Ben Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator. Two years ago Grosser became interested in the profusion of numbers on a Facebook page (“9 people like this, View 12 more comments”). So he created a browser plug-in that removes these numbers: You log in and see all the same Facebook material but none of the urgent little numbers telling you how much stuff you’ve missed, how many likes you got. It calms some people down; others feel like they’re missing a biological clock for their online lives.
If Facebook Demetricator is art, where exactly is it? You don’t go to a museum to see it. Its impact comes from living with the plug-in for days and days. If you just look at, say, a screenshot of someone else’s demetricated Facebook, you don’t really get it. Your monitor or Facebook—or maybe your browser’s plug-in directory—are both the medium and the gallery wall. This suits Grosser fine: He has about 8,000 people actively using it and many more who’ve tried it. “How many artists would kill to have thousands of people engaged with their art all the time? Like using it daily?” he says.
Christiane Paul, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, calls this kind of thing net art, and it lives wholly online. Since so much digital culture is already pretty strange and aesthetically interesting—Russian dash-cam videos, Nyan cat remixes—net art becomes part of the overall pretty hallucinatory experience of being online all the time. “Not everyone who experiences these works would even think about them as art,” Paul says.
This confusion poses a real challenge for the genre. For one thing, it limits its collection. Technically the Hirshhorn acquired Song1. But in a physical sense, this means that the museum acquired a computer that runs the software that executes the work—on Windows 7. The museum intends to mount Song1 again in a few years. But what happens when Microsoft stops supporting the operating system and new computers can’t run it? Other museums have already discovered that digital art they acquired back in the 1990s was designed for browsers and software that are now obsolete. For example, in 1995 the Whitney bought Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, a pioneering interactive project that allowed anyone worldwide to contribute to an ever-growing sentence. But the code doesn’t work on a modern browser.
Would porting the code from a legacy system be the equivalent of, say, restoring a Vermeer? Or would it be more like adding new elements to a Vermeer? After some debate, the curators decided to do both: To create their own updated version of the piece that runs and to display it alongside the old, broken one. In the old world of art, you preserve the paint; in the digital world, you preserve the code.
This concern isn’t just intellectual. The tactical universe of high art—with its money, funding, and grants—is still very much gallery-based. Many curators aren’t sure how seriously to take the new digital artists, much less how to display what they do. They’re not even sure what to call the work. After all, much of modern digital art is essentially invisible. It’s code. It’s a process. Just looking at it isn’t enough. You’re supposed to experience it. The art of the Demetricator is, in a way, not entirely what you see on the screen at all. It’s the software Grosser wrote, the underlying algorithm and the experience it creates on a daily basis when you log in to Facebook, and it seems like a denuded, slightly alien landscape. By redesigning Facebook, even subtly, the Demetricator makes its users feel how the software works. In the words of Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, the artists are using “procedural rhetoric.” It’s code as a sort of argument, a way of making a point about the world.
Probably the most successful deployers of procedural rhetoric are creators of artistic videogames—maybe because the videogame audience is already fluent in thinking about the underpinnings of what they see onscreen. (Whenever a new version of Call of Duty comes out, fans spend months arguing online about how the latest iteration of artificial intelligence affects the feel of the gameplay.) One of the most riveting pieces of game art is Jason Rohrer’s Passage, which starts off like a simple, chunky, side-scrolling adventure—but a few minutes in, you realize that your blocky character appears to be aging. A few minutes later, inevitably, you die. You’re aware there’s more game to explore, but you’ll never get there, no matter how many times you play. Passage’s mechanic, the code governing the game’s behavior, is the message. “It’s a memento mori,” Rohrer says.
Aitken similarly used algorithmic generation in Mirror, two huge LED panels he installed on the outside of the Seattle Art Museum. He shot hundreds of hours of video of the area, moving in concentric circles outward from the downtown core, capturing terrain from forest to a Boeing factory. But Mirror is a permanent installation, and Aitken didn’t want the video to just loop monotonously. So he set it up to operate procedurally: The installation monitors the museum’s environment—temperature, cloud cover, and patterns of local traffic, which it senses using two cameras pointing at the street—and feeds the data into an algorithm to pick which clips to play. The result is an artwork that never quite repeats itself, though it pulses with the rhythms of the city around it. “That might actually be one of the last barriers of art for the viewer to really embrace—a work that lives in perpetual flux,” Aitken says. “It might be the last landscape.”
To prepare for Station to Station, Aitken has spent the summer crisscrossing the country, interviewing artists and videoing their performances in each town where his train will stop. On an afternoon in May, he and his 10-person film crew cram themselves into the small LA rehearsal space of No Age, a punk duo—drummer/singer Dean Allen Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall. While Spunt hammers away and Randall bounces up and down, coaxing out swirls of distorted noise, Aitken peers into his camera, alternately frowning and nodding his head to the music. After half an hour of shooting, he gets an idea.
“Why don’t you start by standing totally still?” he says. “Frozen, like a photograph. Then I’ll call the action.”
The band members take position, holding still as statues for 15 seconds, until Aitken gives them a signal and they launch into the song. Three minutes later, as the last chord hangs in the air, Aitken suddenly yells out again: “Stay totally still! Still!”
Spunt and Randall freeze again, standing in precisely the same position, except this time almost trembling from exhaustion, their arms slick with sweat.
“OK,” Aitken says, looking up with a grin breaking out. He’s loose again; he got what he wanted. “OK, fantastic! You guys, that was great! The start and stop—you’re frozen again, but you’re hyperventilating.”
If Aitken were just shooting video of a rock band, it wouldn’t be much to look at. The art comes from the delivery mechanism. When the Station to Station train rumbles across the continent, this footage will be part of the overall show—available as part of the online Station to Station experience, along with chunks of local culture from elsewhere that Aitken will drag out, like samples. His team is also working with the same company that made the LED panels for Mirror to design screens for the sides of the train itself, to display more imagery. This turns out to be hard: “The challenges are keeping everything connected and keeping it on the train,” Aitken’s producer, Chris Totushek, says. “Even if you’re going only 50 miles per hour on those things, when another freight line comes in another direction, it wants to rip things off.”
Station to Station is a very strange bird. In one sense it’s just a huge, rolling celebration of woolly local scenes, raw and pure in the most nondigital way possible. (New York magazine called it “Coachella on wheels.”) The range of artists Aitken plans to hook up with along the way is almost comically diverse. A flamenco dancer is scheduled to perform in California; the artist Olafur Eliasson wants to make a “drawing machine” that will autocreate an artwork as it traverses the country. Aitken is angling to get dance music pioneer Giorgio Moroder to hop on board, gathering samples and music to produce “an extended mix that goes across the country.” Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto is donating a sort of ceremonial yurt that Aitken will … well, do something with. The live components are part of the point he’s making: In a world where you can call up culture on demand, live shows have become the one non-copyable, non-streamable, totally intimate experience.
Yet—and here’s where Aitken messes with our expectations—he will also stream the action online for the world to see, recording moments on the train, editing them while they roll along, and then putting it all on a website. The trip will be visible, in pieces, across multiple screens. He calls the train a “nomadic broadcast tower” that will tune in to frequencies of culture, like an FM dial moving station to station and picking up bits of voices and songs, kind of the way The Waste Land itself combines sampled voices. “That’s really what interests me, this idea of taking these disparate moments and dropping them into something that’s moving, something that’s changing,” Aitken says, “a platform that’s literally changing people and voices as it goes.”
After finishing the No Age shoot, Aitken’s crew pile into their trucks and hurry into the LA hills to film another band, Califone, which is playing at the home of a friend of Aitken’s. This performance is part of a trend known as living room tours, where bands play in private homes. It’s an idea born of precisely the sort of networked frisson that Aitken loves. The gigs are hyperlocal, but they can’t happen without the band’s Internet-fueled fan outreach. “It’s so quiet in these rooms you can whisper the songs and the audience will hold you up,” lead singer Tim Rutili tells Aitken before the show.
“It’s like an implosion,” Aitken replies. “Rock music started in garages and goes to arenas, and now it’s coming back to houses.”
Just before the music starts, Aitken heads into the kitchen hunting for food. His crew has been shooting for 10 hours straight. He finds a bowl of almonds and begins wolfing them down. He works punishingly long days. Tomorrow he’s flying off to Minneapolis. “This morning at 5:30,” he says, “I was sending an email to everyone saying, ‘Hey, we need to have a bunch of young brass musicians meet us when we get there. We have to make this happen!’” He laughs again. “I don’t know if it’s going to happen! We don’t know any brass musicians there. But it would be cool!”
In fact, despite all this planning, Aitken insists he has no idea precisely what will happen at the train stops. “I mean, I can do my best to say Patti Smith will be here, and an underground electronic musician will be here, and there’ll be this performance piece,” he tells me. “We have no idea the friction that will be created or not, or the random things that will come in.” He says he wants the chance to be a core part of the project.
This sounds alternately like false modesty and the gentle duplicity of an artist who isn’t completely comfortable talking about his work. But I believe Aitken genuinely doesn’t know what to expect. Some of his best work has come from setting up an unpredictable situation and riding it out. In his 2008 work, Migration, he assembled various wild animals—an owl, a deer, a beaver, a fox—in different hotel rooms, one species at a time. Though the rooms look similar, he actually shot in hotels all across the US, so the bland indistinguishability of the hotels became part of the point: The animals are migratory, forever out of place, and humans have created artificial, anonymous places that wrap around them. The resulting footage is uncanny. In one scene a massive buffalo looms in the center of the room, then reaches down to hook a horn under a bedsheet, lifting it up and shaking it almost as if trying to make, or unmake, the bed.
Aitken’s work has always thrived on that sense of displacement. He made viewers feel like they were forever in the wrong place—circumnavigating an entire building to see all of a work but never quite getting the whole picture. He took the rising technology of his time—the omnipresent screens of our daily lives—and made them uncanny again; when you walked away from Song1 and pulled out your glowing smartphone, it looked simultaneously like a lovely portal to other people and a glassy void. And with his fellow New Aesthetic artists, he has turned galleries inside out, making something that’s digital yet concrete, looming over you in public.
In that sense, Station to Station might be the apotheosis of Aitken’s quest. When his train pulls out of New York, he’ll be hacking the very idea of geography—drawing works across the map even as he broadcasts them into the ether, producing work that changes and morphs as it goes. In the old world, you traveled to see the art; now it’ll travel to see you—either pulling into your town or being beamed to a computer you pull out of your pocket. It’s the ultimate dislocation for a world filled with dislocations. The audience stands still while the art zooms by.
