Doug Aitken is one of LA’s finest cultural figures. He does art—film, sculpture, paintings, multi-media, etc. This art’s been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries around the world. He’s also a really swell guy, as uniquely curious and considerate in his courtesies as he is with his craft. Aitken resides in Venice, CA and likes to surf often. His shows are some of the coolest I’ve had the privilege to see.

I meet up with Aitken at his studio in Venice to discuss his new artwork, Lightscape, which is many things—a feature- length film, a forthcoming multi-screen installation, and a series of live music performances, some of which will stage in 2025 at the Marciano Art Foundation in LA. Over a chamomile tea Aitken pours me, I witness segments of incomplete but nearly finished Lightscape. It leaves my arm hair standing in some scenes, and in others I can’t help but shake my head at the stubborn endearment of the human species.

While cast and populated with humans, Los Angeles and its surroundings are as critical a character in Lightscape, treated with a tough tenderness we don’t often intersect with when considering Southern California: its beauty, its brutality, its relentlessly coarse and candied hues all treated with a sort of subdued respect and neutrality, and without question, stunningly photographed.

Where Lightscape takes the Aitken canon and exceeds itself into a new—and frankly masterful—arena is in its sound design. To accomplish this remarkable viewer experience, spread over a dozen song cycles, Aitken collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. How you like them apples? Woven in are original compositions created by Aitken and collaborator Grant Gershon, which at various intervals blend into works by seminal minimalists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk. Even Los Angeles stalwart Beck gets in on the music.

The composite results of this unequivocal film—images of which are scattered throughout this issue—are the stuff of guttural glory, fed through the ears but felt in the spine, the sphincter, the heart. In numerous ways, as we pan across The City of Angels and its deserts, its coast, we’re made aware of the rabbit holes we’ve tunneled down, the vistas we’ve summitted—where we’ve been—but the film could also be said to ask where we might be headed. For Aitken, as you’ll read below, the answer, however inconclusive, is as much about the will of the viewer—that critical curiosity we must fight to keep kindled—as it is in his impassioned treatment.

Talk to me about relics in the film. You’ve got what appear to be inactive airplanes and machinery, for instance. Would you agree that beyond physical relics in the film, there are psychological ones?

I think Lightscape is this composition of locations, people, and places. I wanted something that was very diverse and very broad. I wanted a narrative that was fragmented. I think in a lot of ways, like when you look at the way we live our lives now, we don’t live the straight story. There isn’t a beginning and a middle and an end. There isn’t a perfect conclusion anymore. Everything is like a river of information that’s constantly flowing—points of light are connecting. I wanted to make a project that made a different kind of structure. A structure that, to me, felt more honest to how I live my life and how we’re moving forward.

In the work, there is a diversity of places.There’s abandoned parts of Death Valley to airplane graveyards. The relics that you’re talking about really speak to the past, this idea of the Industrial Revolution, this idea of the 20th century moving forward, but not quite making it. Then there are other aspects to the film that are very future-forward, like robotics factories. We find a scene where a young guy is working there, and he starts moving faster and faster, and he’s kind of moving at the speed of the machines and almost surpassing them. In this work, for me, it’s an attempt to make a different kind of format and to express these questions instead of giving you an answer, “Like, let’s make an artwork that is a journey. Let’s go downstream together and see where it takes us. Let’s go into darkness where things aren’t undefined and everything isn’t spelled out.”

To me, that’s really what art can do, and that’s what art needs to do now. It needs to give us a space for that, art isn’t absolute, and it isn’t black and white.

This element of didn’t quite get there, is interesting, because we obviously live in Southern California, which is an exporter of dreams and self-prophecy. But a lot of that goes sideways or becomes fractal, and perhaps that’s meaningful in its own right?

I think that a lot of Lightscape is based on this idea of the horizon. This idea that, in front of all of us, on this planet, is the end of the day. The transition to night, the horizon line, and what’s past that. And, that liminal space is really where we dream and hallucinate, where we wonder what’s next, where we reflect on our own selves and our identity.I really wanted to lean into that with this project and to look at that idea metaphorically, and also literally.

Tell me about something that surprised you in the process of bringing this to life?‍

I think the process of making this project was surprising. Lightscape—it’s artwork that has multiple platforms—it’s a film that has almost no language; that’s completely music- driven. We wrote most of the music—all the vocal music. This filmic story then explodes into live performances, so we can have LA Master Chorale and LA Philharmonic performing to it. Then the film/artwork can explode again into this lotus blossom, with all these different pedals kind of moving in different directions. It creates a large- scale, multi-screen installation that you can just walk into and get lost in, and I really love too. I love the idea that it doesn’t end up in a little convenient place. It’s actually at the Marciano Art Foundation, which is linked to the Getty PST [Art]. Where you can go into this huge dark chamber. It’s like catacomb space, and sound is moving around you. The images are like a choreography of landscape and humanity.

The iterations are as elastic as your subject matter in ways.

There’s a show we’re doing at Regen Projects that opens in January, and that’s entirely sculptures and objects that have come out of the Lightscape project. It’s an interesting one because with the sculptures everything’s physical and tangible. You can touch it, and it’s raw. There’s a violence to these pieces, like one sculpture is three mountain lions made out freeway debris and ocean plastics. There’s two caribou, whose antlers become light and illumination, clashing with each other.

In reading the literature around the piece and how it harkens this notion of “where are we going” or “where have we been?”, my default is to assume there’s going to be somberness, or sorrow, or oppression given the current state of the world. Yet, from what I saw, it’s in its own kind of liminal space with the direction. How did you impart that in your subjects?

By having a film that had multiple stories, it was very polyphonic. I felt like I could maybe go wider, and I wouldn’t be restricted to one emotion or narrative. In doing so, you really find these different worlds colliding, these different people and places. A woman on the subway at night going to work at a robotics factory one day, bleeds into another at a modernist house around a chlorinated pool. The early seventies Hockney ideal becomes a fever dream. By having these different narrative islands with these different characters, it was an attempt to create a wider landscape and to also really let the landscape speak and become a character.

One of the things I find oppressive with film and movies is being told what to think, and someone’s holding my hand, and they’re taking me one step to another. I think we can be challenged more. Our media, our structures of storytelling, often spoon-feed us. But our minds and our imaginations want to wander and drift. We want wildness and unexpected moments. In a lot of ways, that’s what keeps us stimulated. That’s what keeps the electricity in the air, so with a project like this there wasn’t a formal script or anything when we started filming it, a lot of it was improvisational.

How about the actual people you captured? What’s the story there?‍

It’s interesting because in the work, there’s a lot of non- actors. There’s people that we just found in a diner, or a friend-of-a friend, or someone walking down the sidewalk, and we pulled them into a scene. It’s pretty punk rock iin terms of how we work with people, for the most part. There’s a scene in there that’s shot at midnight to two in the morning at a donut shop in Burbank. It’s Beck, La Lom, James Gadson, and some young drifter girl. It just created this choreography.

Concerning the improvisational nature of the project, when exchanging with persons within the film, was it about listening to them as much as them listening to you?

There were a couple moments that really create a dialogue back and forth. There’s a scene where we’re filming this guy, Konkrete, who’s an amazingly fast krump dancer. We were filming someplace with a dark background. I was watching how he’s moving and the expressiveness of it. It’s really incredible, like expressionistic painting from the 1920s. His facial features and gestures are so controlled, but intense. At the end of it, I said, “Next week, we’re going to shoot in this automated Amazon factory.”

And he said, “What is it?” And I told him. He said, “Oh, wow. You know, I grew up in Oakland, and I was really broke. The first job I had was at an Amazon robotics factory, and I worked there. I worked in this factory, and I would dance while I worked and emulate the machines while I was flipping boxes and doing factory work?”

I said, “Yeah, I want to film you in an Amazon robotics factory.” He said, “This would be an incredible life cycle for me. This would be like seven years later, and I will come back to that factory, and now I have a career in dance. I can come back, and I can know every machine. I know all the movements and could just dance with it.” It was one of these really unexpected moments. It’s so interesting when that line between fiction and nonfiction just disappears. What is real? This is an auto portrait for him. This is part of Konkrete’s life going back to being a 17-year-old in Oakland at a factory. The same environment but now going back armed with this arsenal of creativity that he’s developed himself.

That’s a scenario where a human being has found form with automation or machinery, but there are plenty of instances of humans finding form with nature. How much do you feel the film speaks to the imperative of connecting with nature in the natural environment or, let’s just say, alienation from it?

I think at the core of Lightscape is that kind of duality: Do we fit in, or are we left behind? What do we value? Do we value the root system and that sense of deep time and ecology, or do we escape to the surface and accelerate faster and faster?

Did the film make you feel like this pace of acceleration is something you need to personally evaluate?‍

My pace needs to slow down. Lightscape is like this fever dream. The entire film is almost like a hallucination. At times, that hallucination is bright and clear, other times, it’s dark. It moves fast, it moves slow, but it’s like a hallucinatory, subconscious state. I just felt that we had to make this and I really wanted to see realized.

We do live in a world that is so controlled and calculated. The metrics are counted. Fuck, let’s escape that. Let’s open up the door and fall. Let’s fly. Let’s find some other formats.

We tend to categorize hallucinations around visuals, but a hallucination is often rife with audio layers and sound, freaky sound phenomenons. Let’s talk about sound, and the film, and the composition of a lot of that music. What did you learn about yourself in the process?

I started the vocal music and pieces like four or five years ago. The Los Angeles Master Chorale came to me and they said, “Hey, we’re interested in collaborating. Do you have any ideas?” I said, “Yeah, actually, I’d really like to write a song cycle, but I don’t want it to be sung in a traditional way. I don’t want verse after another telling you a story. I want something that’s hyper minimal, and I want something that’s only short sentences or words, and they’re broken apart and fragmented, and they become these, like, sound clouds, these thought patterns.”

I was really looking at conceptual art much more than I was music. I was looking at Reich or Riley and Meredith Monk. I was thinking about the artworks of the word pieces of Bruce Nauman or Lawrence Weiner. It’s a really reductive use of language, which speaks to me. That’s how I see things. I think some of it might’ve stemmed from my mother. She was a journalist, and she was always writing. I always lean more towards the visual side, and I would take that idea of her writing literature. I was always interested in reducing it, just making it shorter and shorter and shorter, and seeing if I could bring an idea down to a word or a phrase only. That feels so comfortable to me artistically, so I felt like that could be the starting point for how we could write music.

I started recording myself trying to sing these cycles. Then, I bring down a tenor and a soprano to the studio and have them overdub me. We kind of built it up. Eventually, it just got richer and richer, and that became the building blocks for everything that was filmed.

Something that really struck me about the film is the infinitude of the human face. I think that’s the conduit to this intimacy in Lightscape. What do you love about the human face?

It’s so different every time. Everybody has this myriad of expressions and emotions. I think with Lightscape, that’s probably why we chose to primarily work with real people. I didn’t want that filter, that idea of acting. The one person in it who is an actress is Natasha Lyonne, but then that was also interesting because I wanted her character to kind of play her: this woman who’s successful, who has the high-up view from the exclusive hotel, who looks down on Los Angeles and kind of owns that, but then has this moment of quiet reflection, this kind of existential crack.

The word ‘connection’ is a really popular term right now, be it around the digital conversation or our societal challenges with connection across political divides. We’re in the throes of a loneliness epidemic, as it were. It’s in the data, right? People are connecting less, and their version of connection is more fraught. Do you feel like the film aims to remedy some of that affect?

Is culture about connection or reflection? I think about that a lot. What do I want out of seeing music tonight or going to an exhibition? I want to see things in real time. I want my gaze to be broken and I want to be suddenly in that present moment. That experience of the present can be 30 seconds or three hours, or it can be something that haunts me for the rest of my life. In a sense, that idea of presence also relates to what you’re talking about—the doom scrolling, the alienation, the screen time, the kind of separation that we find in our society. I think a lot of that is the space in-between, and in some ways, culture can fill that space. It can really bring us together. I don’t mean that has to happen with positivity and optimism necessarily. It can also be with challenge. It could be with ideas that are provocative, and then you and I have dinner tonight and we have something to talk about. I think that was the larger ecosystem of Lightscape. And it was interesting.

There is a scene in Lightscape with a mountain lion— by a modernist house, chlorinated pool, this animal. It could be behind you. It could be in front of you, it could be waiting for you, to me it was so much about the world around us. That radical friction of humanity refining and refining itself, so it’s more and more seemingly perfect, spotless and precious. But in the hills with the fire trail, is this natural habitat where this wildlife will just do whatever it does. We’re cohabitating this extremely deep ecology, and our built world is just so flat and fast.

I think we really need to break the screen, and to reconnect with a deeper ecological sense of self. I think we need silence in equal parts with the noise. I think we need to have self restraint to sometimes to turn things off. Some of those themes are really at the core of this work.

Are there other sound elements that weren’t compositional that you included in the film?‍

The film is really like one composition. I was really interested in real sounds and field recordings. It might be a tone that ends at the end of Steve Reich’s 18 Musicians and the tone sustains, and it becomes part of the engine rumble of a ‘73 El Camino, and that pattern leads somewhere else. To me it is really how we experience the world. We don’t necessarily see things in silos. I think we’re told to. I think part of culture’s effort is to separate and simplify, but in life, everything’s blurring together. When you drive back today, you might have a track streaming that you’re listening to and maybe the same BPM as the car’s engine next to you. The sounds start phasing and that’s like a John Cage. But let’s own that. Let’s not separate it.

There’s more and more reporting and feedback around people’s management of audio layers because there’s so much goddamn sound in our world. To create a continuity and a cohesive composition from start to finish with all of those layers is spectacular. From a technical standpoint, what did you have to learn to measure all this?

This was an incredibly challenging project. Constant obstacles, another moment or situation that was foreign you’d have to work through. I love that it was so unwieldy, such a wild animal. This beast that’s constantly zigging and zagging.

Where’s the perseverance in that? Some days you’re getting off on the challenges and the obstacles. Others where you’re having to pull up the bootstraps and bite the bullet and deal— what’s it like on a day to day?

I think one thing that you find with projects that are more unorthodox is they can be these Fitzcarraldo’s, where you can find yourself completely alone with a rope trying to pull some obstacle up a hill and there’s no one there, or there’s someone just someone watching you, scratching their head. It sounds silly to talk about.

Some of my more off-the-grid projects like—Station Station or Song One or Black Mirror— projects like this that we’ve done, you just have to keep going. Three months into COVID, the director of the LA Phil called me up and said,”‘I’d love to collaborate with you if you have any ideas.” I said, we’ve been writing this song cycle, but what if we turn that into live music? We turned that into a moving image also, and we kept growing it. It’s interesting. You have these hills and plateaus. The plateaus, where everyone understands, now there’s music involved.

But you wake up at night, you say, “Well, how the fuck am I going to make that music?” When you have a concept and you’re really working with conceptual art, you’re also building the road as you go, you’re forging the path of how to make it work without a road map.

To me, that’s really interesting because that’s where there’s a friction and an energy. You can feel that there’s something that’s different going on, and you can feel that there is room for failure, and you can sense the space that is unknown. That’s at the nucleus of what art making is really about. If there isn’t room for things to collapse or any sense of potential failure or improvisation, then you’re just executing something. You’re just painting by numbers.

So in a way, ‘where are we going’ is about keeping going?

I think keeping going and really being aware of right now. That idea of the presence, that is such a powerful element to culture. It’s like a form of oxygen that culture can give us that doesn’t exist in any place else in humanity.