Doug Aitken
ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images
Solo exhibition extended to Sunday 2 December 2012
Parc des Ateliers
Grande Halle
33 Avenue Victor Hugo
Arles, France
Hours: Monday–Friday 13–18.30h;
Saturday & Sunday 11–18.30h
Following the great success of Doug Aitken’s installation ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images, the LUMA Foundation is pleased to announce the exhibition dates have been extended to Sunday 2 December 2012.
The exhibition opened on 20 October with a performance by Californian composer Terry Riley. An unprecedented live, one-hour, performance merged experimental music and contemporary art within Aitken’s Altered Earth installation. Terry Riley had created an original composition, which was performed live one time only, offering a night of sound and vision.
You can watch a clip of the performance here.
The multimedia work, which Doug Aitken describes as a 21st-century Earthwork, is “a series of moments and fragments of time focusing on the geography of the Camargue, which provides an almost holographic view of the physical landscape.”
The installation ALTERED EARTH creates a form of liquid architecture out of large-scale moving images, which explore new definitions of time and place. Each viewer will be individually and uniquely constructing narratives from what surrounds them.
Watch a video edit of the installation here.
Developed by Meri Media, the app allows to explore multi-channel film, sound, literature and three-dimensional installation space, reflecting on our relation to geography in the digital age and creates a new kind of map. The application is free and can be downloaded at www.doug-aitken-arles.com.
“Aitken’s enormous cinematic screens […] dangle from the vaulted ceiling like fantastical backdrops in a Hollywood sound studio, drawing the viewer into the landscape.”—Wallpaper, 2012
“The images […] create a sense of an ever-changing three-dimensional environment, at times opening out, at other times closing in on you.”—Frieze, 2012
“US artist Doug Aitken has set up one of his most ambitious installations to date.”—Dazed and Confused, 2012
Notes
ALTERED EARTH was first projected onto a purpose-built transparent screen positioned on the Place de la République in Arles in July 2011 during the opening of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie. The second stage of this work was the launch of the app ALTERED EARTH at the Serpentine Gallery in London in October 2011. For its third part, the exhibition ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images is presented in the Grande Halle in Arles, one of the original buildings that belonged to the old SNCF railway workshops in the Parc des Ateliers where the LUMA Foundation is planning to build a new center for the production of ideas, art and exhibitions.
ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images was commissioned and produced by the LUMA Foundation for the Parc des Ateliers in Arles.