Doug Aitken Quotes

When you make work, the concept is the basis for it; all choices of aesthetics or mediums come later.

I am fascinated by the indecisive moment and the peripheral view.

I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

In sound design programs now, you can literally sculpt the sound on visual graphs. Sometimes the visual programs are even more interesting than the music that's making them

I think the idea of embracing the process, creating something, no matter how thin it is, that you can call a starting point - whether it's a word or it's an idea, or it's a little piece of narrative that you might base a film on - starting that journey of making the work. That's also something that every individual does very differently.

Our culture is just too comfortable in creating these kind of divisions between culture.

Divisions between culture is not this precious thing, it's just this dirty beehive with things moving around, creating accidents, and violence, and harmony. It's this kind of beautiful mess, this matter.

I try to just put a blank stage in front of them, and say, "This is your space; you tell me where you're coming from and where you're going." At a certain point, it was interesting as the project started to become what it is now, The Source, which has a physical installation and also an online presence. As we started building the installation, I started thinking, "It's really strange that we're building this installation, this piece of architecture you can go into." It's almost strange because I suppose it's an artwork, but it's an artwork that's really constructed out of ideas.

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

The compartmentalizing is so severe, that we kind of lose track. When you sit down to dinner with friends, you're going to talk about everything, sharing this polyphony of experiences, this spectrum of culture, and it's all cross-pollinating all the time.

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.

I'm not a journalist; I'm probably a horrible interviewer. The one small thing I have is I'm curious, and I'm interested in who I'm with.

What The Source becomes, in a physical sense, is almost like this particle accelerator. There's all these different, discrete voices and ideas. If you just saw two of them together perhaps it might seem completely diverse and like, "Why do you have these two people together?" But as it grows and as it speeds up, it kind of creates a larger dialogue.