About the piece:

This video shows (in excerpts) a special viewing of Doug Aitken's installation "Migration" on October 2, 2008. Doug Aitken invited the musicians Lichens, White Rainbow and Arp to perform live music improvisations to the installation, replacing the film's original soundtrack.
"Migration" is included in the 55th Carnegie International exhibition "Life on Mars" where the piece is projected on the museum's façade through January 2009.

Migration (2008) is an odyssey through a contemporary American landscape of seemingly abandoned hotels and motels. Encompassing executive airport suites and desolate, nondescript inns inhabited, or haunted, by mammals and birds indigenous to the American West, Migration's sequences evoke a scenario in which places of temporary human habitation are confronted with instinctive and wild forces.

"In "Migration" the movements of wild North American migratory animals are transposed upon the ubiquitous space of modern roadside hotels and motels. As the wild birds and animals inhabit these mysteriously vacant and sterile interiors we're taken on a haunting odyssey through the contemporary American landscape. With the film alternating between three billboards within the gallery space, the viewer is left to determine his own place in the often desolate and alienating transitory spaces which man inhabits."


About the artist:

Doug Aitken's art is concerned with stimuli and stories that are asynchronous and fractured. Through the orchestration of multiscreen moving-image installations he has frequently touched on themes of urban isolation, emotional alienation, and expansive natural wilderness. The "characters" he directs—whether humans, machines, animals, or landscapes—often exhibit uncanny behaviors or communicate in strange statements, lending Aitken's immersive audiovisual environments the sense of an unfolding waking dream. Characteristically using up to a dozen or more projectors, monitors, and speakers, Aitken delivers a multimedia experience for our time that suggests a separate category, somewhere between cinema and architectural sculpture.