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Doug Aitken : Electric Earth

by Philippe Vergne

Accompanying Doug Aitken's first full-scale survey exhibition, this volume documents the artist’s work across photography, video, and architecture. Essays and illustrations examine his interdisciplinary approach and themes such as time and environmental decay.

Accession 9783791355696 ISBN 9783791355696 Publisher Prestel

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position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:12
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spine_text: Doug Aitken: Electric Earth MOCA

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Topics and Themes

1. **Environmental Decay & Post-Industrial Entropy**
Aitken's work is rooted in the slow collapse of natural and built environments — chronicling ecological degradation, industrial abandonment, and the creeping exhaustion of human systems. The "Electric Earth" of the title evokes a planet altered by technology and industrial civilization, and the work mourns what has been lost in that transformation.

Connect to books about: ecological art, environmental humanities, post-industrial landscapes, urban ruin photography, entropy in culture.

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2. **The Collapse of Linear Time**
A central preoccupation across Aitken's body of work is the disintegration of conventional, sequential time. His multi-channel video installations fragment narrative into looping, simultaneous streams, proposing a contemporary experience of time that is non-linear, cyclical, and disorienting.

Connect to books about: philosophy of time, non-linear narrative, duration and memory, media temporality, postmodern fiction.

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3. **Interdisciplinary & Expanded Art Practice**
The book surveys work that refuses to stay within any single medium — spanning video, sculpture, photography, architecture, land art, sound, spoken word, and live happenings. This dissolving of disciplinary borders is itself the artistic argument: art can and should exceed the gallery wall and the art-object frame.

Connect to books about: expanded cinema, installation art, intermedia art, Fluxus and performance art, art and architecture crossover.

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4. **Immersive & Experiential Space**
Aitken's installations are conceived as total environments — enveloping the viewer in image, sound, and space simultaneously. The show at MOCA was conceptualized as "an entropic landscape suspended between city, broadcasting machine, and labyrinth," collapsing the boundary between artwork and inhabited world.

Connect to books about: immersive art, phenomenology of space, spectator theory, sensory experience in art, the aesthetics of atmosphere.

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5. **Mobility, Nomadism & Contemporary Life**
Aitken's practice engages with the restless, image-saturated nature of modern existence — the condition of perpetual movement, displacement, and transience that defines life in a networked, globalized world. His multi-channel works mirror the fragmented attention of a society always in motion.

Connect to books about: nomadism and deterritorialization, globalization and culture, speed and modernity, psychogeography, liquid modernity.

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6. **Image Culture & the Ubiquity of Media**
Running through Aitken's work is a deep interrogation of how images circulate, multiply, and colonize contemporary consciousness. His multichannel video practice reflects on the broad availability of images and their power to shape — and destabilize — individual and collective identity.

Connect to books about: visual culture studies, media theory, image saturation, simulacra and simulation, the society of the spectacle.

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7. **Experimental Music, Sound & Avant-Garde Traditions**
Aitken draws explicitly on the history of experimental music, 20th-century avant-gardes, and cinema, situating his practice within a lineage of radical artistic experimentation. Sound is not merely accompaniment in his work — it is structural, sculptural, and conceptually load-bearing.

Connect to books about: experimental music history, sound art, avant-garde movements, John Cage and indeterminacy, the history of video art.

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8. **Urban Abandonment & Architecture as Subject**
Aitken repeatedly turns to the city — not as backdrop, but as protagonist. Abandoned urban spaces, altered furniture, and architectural experiments all feature in his work as evidence of how human settlement decays, mutates, and is reclaimed. The built environment becomes a site of cultural memory and loss.

Connect to books about: ruin aesthetics, urban decay, psychogeography, vernacular architecture, the politics of public space.

Doug Aitken : Electric Earth

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