The Slouching Beast of Southern California 

Alternately ominous and transcendent, Doug Aitken’s panoramic Lightscape cycles through scenes of human movement enthralled by highways and city streets.

Brian KarlMarch 3, 2025

LOS ANGELES — Walking into the massive Scottish Rite Masonic Temple to watch Doug Aitken’s Lightscape is like arriving backstage mid-movie at an old-fashioned drive-in. Extensive wooden struts buttress the installation’s seven large-scale screens — each more than 20 by 15 feet (six by four and a half meters) — that enclose viewers in a panoramic field of ceaselessly moving images and a soundtrack that includes actors’ spoken ruminations; location sounds such as car tires, lawn sprinklers, train horns, and boots on asphalt; and snatches of minimalist musical compositions. 

At Regen Projects, Doug Aitken Reimagines Nature Through the Lens of the Anthropocene

The artist uses sculpture, film and textile hybrids to explore deep time, ecological collapse and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the natural world, technology and human intervention.

By Jordan Riefe • 02/04/25 8:00am

In the lead-up to Frieze L.A., there’s one artist who’s painting the town from Hollywood to Grand Avenue. Venice-based Doug Aitken has debuted new work across three venues this season. Premiering last November was his latest film, Lightscape, starring Natasha Lyonne, which has since moved to the Marciano Art Foundation through March 15. It serves as a thematic counterpart to his new show, “Psychic Debris Field” at Regen Projects in Hollywood, a collection of wall works and sculptures exploring eco-history and contemporary habitation in Western landscapes.

Restless: The Art Of Doug Aitken In ‘Lightscape’ And Beyond

Tom Teicholz | January 29, 2025

Doug Aitken, the polymedia multidisciplinary artist whose work can seem deceptively simple or so multilayered in its complexity as to be difficult to fathom, has a new work, Lightscape, a one hour immersive film and music installation, on view at the Marciano Art Foundation, as well as paintings, sculptures and installations that have grown out of the project on exhibit at Regen Projects in Los Angeles.

'I don’t want to see culture always falling for formulas': inside Doug Aitken's ambitious cinematic installation in LA

Doug Aitken’s Lightscape is an ambitious installation at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles

By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

published January 20, 2025

in Features

“You can get lost in the blink of an eye,” intones a voice amidst the cinematic cacaphony of Doug Aitken’s Lightscape, an ambitious installation at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. As much a sonic as a visual accomplishment, it is a onehour Gesamkunstwerk of Aitken’s preoccupations using characters and scenes familiar from his earlier excavations of Southern California, especially Los Angeles. It encompasses much that is ravishing, troubling and incomprehensible about the region even to residents such as myself.

Doug Aitken and Beck on Making
Art in an Age of White Noise

By Beck

January 6, 2025

For the artists Doug Aitken and Beck, making art nowadays is an attempt to counter the constant white noise of a culture so rapid and fragmented that it’s hard to discern the value of any one thing. “It’s like a caterwaul of unimportance,” said Beck, the eight-time Grammy winner, when the two got together in Los Angeles last month for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity and inspiration. “This shrieking of tiny, small, inconsequential moments and blips of existence all screaming at the same time.” Aitken, whose new project Lightscape debuted at the LA Phil in November and is currently on view through March at the Marciano Art Foundation, agrees.

Marciano Art Foundation | A Proper Opening

Celebrating Doug Aitken's "Lightscape" and "Quaternion" by Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon

Written by Sam Fredericks

On December 14, the Marciano Art Foundation held an opening reception for Lightscape by Doug Aitken and Quaternion by Andrew Zebulon & Kristen Wentrcek. The night featured a performance from LA Phil's Joanne Pearce Martin, and a special screening of Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection. Many notable members of the Los Angles arts community attended the evening, from Marciano Art Foundation Director Hanneke Skerath, to artist Kim Gordon.

MEET DOUG AITKEN’S NEW MUSE

Why the artist set his multisensory masterwork in the West

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL

“There’s a scene with Beck in front of this donut shop, sitting with the drummer James Gadson, and these drifter cars are doing their own donuts. We see the patterns of car tires on the ground,” says Doug Aitken, a multidisciplinary artist based in Venice, Calif., of his just-completed boundary-pushing project, Lightscape. “It’s almost feral, creatively.” His latest work encompasses film, music, live performance, and installation, using a mesmerizing method of storytelling through images and sound. The feature-length piece — he calls it “polymedia” — plays out as a fever dream or hallucination of the modern world propelled by what Aitken says is a “constant sense of continuous movement.”

Doug Aitken | That Tirelessly Trained Curiosity Via Issue 195, Where Are We Going?

Written by Matthew Bedard

Doug Aitken is one of LA’s finest cultural figures. He does art—film, sculpture, paintings, multi-media, etc. This art’s been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries around the world. He’s also a really swell guy, as uniquely curious and considerate in his courtesies as he is with his craft. Aitken resides in Venice, CA and likes to surf often. His shows are some of the coolest I’ve had the privilege to see.

Doug Aitken's Lightscape Dazzles and Darts Between Genres @ the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles

December 5, 2024

On Saturday, November 16th, Los Angeles' art and fashion elite converged at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, resplendent in their finest attire and about as glitzy as the average Doug Aitken film. Lightscape, the enigmatically titled centerpiece of the PST-sponsored music festival "Noon to Midnight," had generated considerable buzz. I overheard one patron refer to it as a film, another as a symphony, an art installation, a performance. Tickets were highly coveted and difficult to come by. As the crowd filed into the concert hall, I observed friend groups atomize into disparate units, each member claiming their individually assigned seat. Despite this dispersal, the patrons exuded a nervous excitement akin to a dinner at a trendy pop-up where the menu is a mystery.

Doug Aitken: KCRW Guest DJ Set

Hosted by Novena Carmel Dec. 04, 2024

LA artist, filmmaker, and “architectural interventionist” Doug Aitken’s works are numerous, award winning, and frequent fodder for big cultural conversations. See: 2007’s Sleepwalkers, in which Aitken transformed an entire block of Manhattan as he covered the exterior walls of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with projections. Or 2017’s Mirage, a site-specific sculpture that takes the form of a home completely covered in mirrors. The latter originated in 2017, in the heart of the Californian desert. It’s no wonder that when members of KCRW’s Art Department found out he was coming in for a Guest DJ set, we were greeted with at least one reply of: “He’s the reason that I went to college.” 

Doug Aitken's multimedia 'Lightscape' creates modern mythologies

By Kristopher Gee Los Angeles

PUBLISHED 12:30 PM PT Dec. 02, 2024

LOS ANGELES — Doug Aitken's "Lightscape" premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Nov. 16 and will move to the Marciano Art Foundation as an installation from Dec. 17 to March 15, 2025. 

The project is a collaboration with the LA Phil and The Los Angeles Master Chorale under the direction of Grant Gershon.

Doug Aitken’s Poetic Tableau of Southern California

“I wanted to make something aggressively non-linear, using sound and music to express things that hard language couldn’t,” the artist said of his latest work.

LOS ANGELES — A cowboy hitches his horse to a post at a gas station. A coyote stalks a check-cashing spot, illuminated by neon. A woman dances alone through the puddles of an abandoned parking garage. “All of this will never make sense,” a voice repeats in Doug Aitken’s “Lightscape.”

When we think of arts institutions as bastions of culture, thought, and innovation, it’s hard to come up with an orchestra doing a better job than the Los Angeles Philharmonic. While their programming certainly doesn’t lack the “classics” that orchestras often rely on to fill seats, they’ve also modeled a more forward-thinking approach.

“Lightscape,” Artist Doug Aitken’s Latest Work, Takes on the American West - With a Little Help From Hollywood

The artist's latest work required five years, one mountain lion, and countless friends to realize. Its first iteration—presented in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic—blends film and live music to conjure a vision of our collective future.

A white-haired lady wanders Richard Neutra’s landmark midcentury house in Silver Lake at night, when she suddenly encounters a mountain lion calmly purring — and a grand piano in the room begins to play, on its own, Philip Glass’ “Mad Rush.”

It’s a scene from “Lightscape,” the latest hard-to-explain creation by Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken. The 65-minute film will premiere Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall with live accompaniment by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of the Noon to Midnight daylong festival of new music.

Artist Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ is a commentary on CA, our future

Artist Doug Aitken’s new project “Lightscape” is a collaboration with the LA Philharmonic and LA Master Chorale that weaves music and film to create an ethereal and visual soundscape.

Konkrete’s Full-Circle Moment in an Amazon Warehouse

By Steven Vargas Published: Nov 8, 2024

Krump dancer Konkrete performs in an Amazon warehouse in Doug Aitken’s Lightscape project for PST Art.

For three months in 2020, Kevin “Konkrete” Davis Jr. worked on the floor at an Amazon fulfillment center in Sacramento, working to save up money between dance projects in Los Angeles. The professional dancer is known for competing in TV contest shows like So You Think You Can Dance and World of Dance, performing in Beyonce’s “Renaissance” tour, and two-stepping behind Ryan Gosling in the actor’s “I’m Just Ken” rendition at the Academy Awards. Recently, Konkrete returned to familiar territory: an Amazon warehouse, this time in Oxnard, to dance on camera for Doug Aitken’s Lightscape, a complex multimedia project for Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide festival, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.