Doug Aitken Quotes

I think there is a hunger for things that wake you up, something that makes you peel back your eyes, that reminds you that you are alive. Art is at its best when it is in the ‘now.’

The ‘Station to Station’ film is a fast-moving journey through the modern creative landscape. It’s a kaleidoscope of voices and impressions rather than a standard linear film.

I don’t really care about interruptions. I accept technology, and I don’t turn things off. I’ve found a peace with fragmentation and a harmony with switching gears quickly to other things.

I’m really a believer in being in situations that feel new and awkward and different. And I love that feeling of being in motion – that sense you find when you’re traveling.

Divisions between culture is not this precious thing, it’s just this dirty beehive with things moving around, creating accidents, and violence, and harmony. It’s this kind of beautiful mess, this matter.

I have always just made things. I don’t see what I make as being defined by a medium or aesthetic. It probably comes more from a fundamental restlessness, an attempt to create tools for questioning or understanding, and I have always been interested in using a wide spectrum of mediums to do this.

We’re moving into an era when things are dematerialised and much more holographic. Floating above the physical world and the geographic map, there’s another landscape that’s constantly changing – something like a cloud – of communication, information, exchange and commerce.

I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don’t really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn’t even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn’t really have movements in the same way. Instead it’s made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.

The ‘Station to Station’ film has been fascinating to create. It feels as though it made itself in a way, and after awhile, the film told us what it needed and began to sculpt itself.

The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it’s not a sonnet, it’s not an opera, it’s something short – three and a half minutes by nature – and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

There’s really no differentiation between the work I make and the world I live in.

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I’d love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.

The idea of a ‘happening’ is that there is little distance between the viewer and it, whatever ‘it’ is. It’s an experience that’s on-going and evolving.

‘Planet Caravan’ by Black Sabbath is such a delicate song from such a surprising place.

We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.

Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.

We are engaging with so many art forms at once in the 21st century, but we’re presented with them in a way that is so isolated.

I always thought about ‘Station to Station’ as an approach. It was about creating an alternative platform for culture where different mediums could co-exist.

One of the core reasons for creating ‘Station to Station’ was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process.

I’m not a journalist; I’m probably a horrible interviewer. The one small thing I have is I’m curious, and I’m interested in who I’m with.

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all – that is where the energy is.

We’re living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.

I see life as a burning meteorite that you can climb all over, and feed off, as it is falling to earth.

I am fascinated by the indecisive moment and the peripheral view.