ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images
The APP is available for anyone to download from the following website www.doug-aitken-arles.com
ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images, is a piece by Doug Aitken commissioned and produced by the LUMA Foundation for the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, South of France. The Parc des Ateliers is an experimental site dedicated to the production of art and ideas currently being developed with architect Frank Gehry. The ALTERED EARTH App is free for the public to download. This accessibility allows ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images to travel in a ubiquitous way that defies commodification and transgresses cultural and geographic boundaries.ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images explores the idea that the modern landscape has completely blurred the distinction of fiction and non-fiction. Within this App the viewer is empowered to create his own journey through a landscape via multiple layers of media. The project is based around a series of unique moving images, all captured entirely in Arles, South France and the surrounding Camargue region.
“The Camargue region is the setting: a landscape which emits a raw beauty and unique individuality. ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images, however, is not a documentary. This is a project that explores a new interpretation of the world around us as a kaleidoscopic sum of fragments.” states Doug Aitken.
The App empowers the viewer to move seamlessly from medium to medium, embracing multi-channel film, text, information graphics, research, installation and music. In doing so, the piece expands the concept of “place”into a limitless digital universe while attempting to forge an entirely new art form.
Commissioned and produced by the LUMA Foundation for the Parc des Ateliers and developed in conjunction with award-winning digital publisher MERI Media, graphic designer Peter Crnokrak and multidisciplinary information architecture firm INABA, the ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images App creates a new kind of map.
Expository texts by renowned writers Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sasha Frere-Jones and Lars Bang Larsen discuss the relation of film/moving image, architecture, earth art, new media, original research and fiction/narrative. Musicians White Rainbow, Lichens, Steve Roden and others have contributed to create an original score for the project.
This represents the second station of ALTERED EARTH: Arles, city of moving images, which was first projected on a glass screen on Arles’ roman Place de la Republique as part of the LUMA Foundation Summer program 2011, during the Rencontres Internationales de Photographie d’Arles (International Photography Festival). A third manifestation, a site-specific 12-screen installation presented in the Grande Halle of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, will take place in Spring 2012. This event will be an integral part of the evolutionary process undertaken to develop what will become a cultural model for the early part of 21st century.
The LUMA Foundation specializes in the production of challenging artistic projects combining a particular interest in environmental issues, human rights, education, and culture in the broadest sense. Its current focus is to develop a truly experimental site, the Parc des Ateliers, in the French city of Arles, with architect Frank Gehry in Arles. This project envisions an interdisciplinary centre for artistic production and research, exhibitions, education, and archives.
For more information, please contact:
Mustapha Bouhayati: mbouhayati@brunswickgroup.com / +33 170 920 050
