The most comprehensive book to date on the innovative multimedia artist Doug Aitken. Defying definitions of genre, Doug Aitken has explored every medium, from architecture and film to installations and interventions. While Aitken’s work varies in both theme and context, his installations share a common thread in their ability to use technology to evoke meaningful personal reactions from the viewer, encourage audience interaction, and inspire communal gatherings. His films often explore themes of displacement and temporality, and through his keen awareness of motion, sound, and color he creates dreamlike landscapes and the futurist aesthetic for which he has become known. This beautifully designed book features visual essays by the artist and surveys his work in all mediums. The monograph is organized thematically into the four most prevalent ideas connected with his work, inspires thought, and will leave readers examining their own relationship to the world around them.

Accompanying the artist's first full-scale survey exhibition, this generously illustrated book explores Doug Aitken's work across mediums, disciplines, and themes. From photography to architecture, and from video to spoken word, Doug Aitken has delved into a variety of art forms to create a provocative body of work. This volume surveys the full scope and depth of Aitken's work: sound pieces, sculpture, architectural experiments, land art and happenings, which embrace a collaborative spirit across disciplines and beyond walls, to re-imagine the nature of what a work of art can be. Interspersed with hundreds of color illustrations, the book's essays examine the plethora of ideas the artist tackles--from environmental decay to the end of linear time--and explain how and why Aitken challenges many artistic barriers.

Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry and Anne Pasternak. Text by Klaus Biesenbach, Peter Eleey, Doug Aitken.

To the Chinese people, jade is a precious stone endowed with magical properties which encapsulated all that mankind aspires to in terms of character, elegance, tranquility, purity and virtue. The Chinese love jade not merely because of its rarity or its luster but because of a deeper aesthetic value. Chinese Jade: The Spiritual and Cultural Significance of Jade in China presents a comprehensive view of jade and its history in China from Neolithic times to the Qing dynasty. It illustrates pieces of jade that are on display not only in the Palace Museum in Beijing but in the many provincial and other museums across China. It will help the reader to understand what jade means to the Chinese in China; how it is classified and described and where it is found and worked and displayed. It has a value beyond that of a simple catalogue and places jade in its natural, and central, cultural context.

Art is one of the tools we have to sculpt time and create experiences that are highly concentrated, or open and infinite. - Doug Aitken American artist Doug Aitken is internationally recognised for his ambitious practice that incorporates objects, installations, photographs and vast, multi-screen environments that envelop viewers within a kaleidoscope of moving imagery and sound. Aitken has realised museum projects around the world, as well as monumental interventions within the natural landscape and below the ocean's surface. This beautifully designed book encompasses the breadth of Aitken's artistic practice and is produced on the occasion of his survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Australia. Edited by chief curator Rachel Kent, it features a series of in-depth interviews that provide fascinating insights into Aitken's creative thinking and his wider engagement with the creative communities around him; and a series of image plates documenting his acclaimed museum works, landscape interventions and live happenings. Informative and visually compelling, it is sure to be a favourite among Aitken's collectors, as well as those interested in contemporary art.

Text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.

"I became restless with the flat surface of the screen so the work gradually evolved into the rest of the space," says Doug Aitken of his multichannel film work. Lately he has been projecting from multiple points onto a single structure. And he has turned from wide-open and lonely landscapes (Electric Earth, Diamond Sea) to wide-open and lonely people (new skin). The protagonist of the surreal "Alpha, " played by cult actor Udo Kier is both: as he travels, he dematerializes and becomes the space that he inhabits. Luckily for readers, Aitken is as bored with the square shape of the conventional book as he is with the conventional screen: this collection of "Alpha" images, accompanied by text from the artist, is bound in the shape of a head in profile.

"For 30 days this summer, Doug Aitken's project Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening, takes over the Barbican Centre with more than 100 free events over 30 days, with special ticketed events every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This 'living exhibition', brings together a fusion of leading international and UK-based artists from the world of contemporary art, music, dance, graphic design and film in a jam-packed programme." -- Barbican website.

This fully illustrated artist book, published in conjunction with Doug Aitken: song 1, includes essays by Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator and the organizing curator; Barney Hoskyns, author of such books as Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, and Weird Scenes & the Sound of Los Angeles, and Dean Kuipers, an editor at the Los Angeles Times and a longtime writer on music.

Civilization raises hopes; civilization is terrifying. These feelings are palpable in the inimitable works of art by the American artist Doug Aitken. His spectacular film and sound works take visitors on a synaesthetic journey around the world and into themselves; in an irresistible maelstrom of expressive images and rhythmic landscapes. With four expansive film installations and correlating sculptures as well as a site-specific sound installation, the exhibition will present an overview of the internationally renowned artist's heterogeneous oeuvre throughout the entire exhibition area of the SCHIRN; and beyond. Aitken's kaleidoscopic universe revolves around life's existential questions, yet it does not supply any simple answers. Instead, the artist lends expression to an almost naïve fascination with being human and people's sense of collectivity and cooperation. Consequently, the recent projects by the Los Angeles-based artist have redefined the exhibition format and gained him worldwide attention, for instance through the illumination of the exterior walls of museums, like at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., or through an elaborately staged happening with the participation of various artists on the Station to Station train journey from New York to San Francisco lasting several weeks. Exhition: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (9.7.-27.9.2015).