Doug Aitken
«Electric Earth»

In Doug Aitken’s cinemascope-like, walk-in, multi-sectioned, video installation «Electric Earth» [...] the public is transported into the atmosphere of an airport by night. A flaming car and an abandoned shopping cart compliment the eerie scenario while, in a parallel world, a noiseless, black rapper sashays through an urban landscape.[...] Here the world of the 20th century is described as though it concerns the remains of an unknown civilization. The role of the black protagonist in «Electric Earth» is so devised that it suggests a meeting of French existentialists with America’s big-city world. Why this and other productions by Doug Aitken continually capture the public’s attention from anew, and often seem to hypnotize them, is something that Aitken explains by knowing how to communicate with the public using here a moment perhaps borrowed from the area of Pop-culture: he says that he is uninterested in compromises of any kind and would refuse to produce intimate works that take time to unfold.