Quotes from Doug Aitken

Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.

The 'Station to Station' film is a fast-moving journey through the modern creative landscape. It's a kaleidoscope of voices and impressions rather than a standard linear film.

We're moving into an era when things are dematerialised and much more holographic. Floating above the physical world and the geographic map, there's another landscape that's constantly changing - something like a cloud - of communication, information, exchange and commerce.

'Planet Caravan' by Black Sabbath is such a delicate song from such a surprising place.

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

In our daily lives, we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living.

I have a weak spot for late '60s-early '70s yippie paperbacks and protest manifestos. I find them at flea markets or online. One of my favorites is 'Right On,' a compendium of student protests made into this 95-cent paperback with the most amazing graphics.

I don't really care about interruptions. I accept technology, and I don't turn things off. I've found a peace with fragmentation and a harmony with switching gears quickly to other things.

Communication is paramount, and what medium or what format you utilize should be a non-issue. In some respects, that has created a barrier for new media, especially web new media, because often times maybe the media itself comes before the concept, before the ideas, and ends up navigating or dictating the outcome.

We are engaging with so many art forms at once in the 21st century, but we're presented with them in a way that is so isolated.

There's really no differentiation between the work I make and the world I live in.

I see life as a burning meteorite that you can climb all over, and feed off, as it is falling to earth.

I have always just made things. I don't see what I make as being defined by a medium or aesthetic. It probably comes more from a fundamental restlessness, an attempt to create tools for questioning or understanding, and I have always been interested in using a wide spectrum of mediums to do this.

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all - that is where the energy is.

I think about museums often. There are things that I want museums to do that they often don't. For me, I like it when there's a system within the museum that can continuously change - whether it's a museum that is nomadic or one that's designed so the building can shape-shift. I like restless spaces, and I want to be engaged.

I think there is a hunger for things that wake you up, something that makes you peel back your eyes, that reminds you that you are alive. Art is at its best when it is in the 'now.'

It's very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present.

I'm really a believer in being in situations that feel new and awkward and different. And I love that feeling of being in motion - that sense you find when you're traveling.

I think that 'Station to Station' is a nomadic project not only in a literal sense, as it's traveling by train from place to place. Some of these places are New York City or Los Angeles, but some of these places are rather off-the-grid places.

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.

My office has two buildings that function like the right and left sides of the brain. There's a room where everything is being edited for an upcoming project, but you can pull out of that into a tranquil space to work in a different, more solitary medium. It's an architectural unfolding of the process instead of just one chaotic structure.

We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.

One of the core reasons for creating 'Station to Station' was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process.

I always thought about 'Station to Station' as an approach. It was about creating an alternative platform for culture where different mediums could co-exist.