Every day for 30 days this summer, Doug Aikten grabbed his camera and shot one 15-second film. (Aitken is a multi-media artist best known as the mastermind behind Station To Station, the roaming art exhibit that carted dozens of artists from NYC to San Francisco on a train.) Aitken's films, which chronicled the goings-on at the Barbican's recently-closed 30-Day Happening, were as diverse as the exhibition itself.
In one, Aitken captures Thurston Moore as he strummed his guitar. In another, a bedazzled woman shows off some very impressive hoola-hooping skills. Aikten filmed painters painting and drummers drumming. There's a fantastic clip of Beck playing a harmonica somewhere in there, too. Aitken unspooled this footage piece by piece on Instagram, where the mini-films lived as homages to the creative process.
It was a veritable cornucopia of art, but these segmented bites of footage weren't the artist's end game. Aitken wanted to make a new kind of film. A kaleidoscopic film, if you will. His final project, aptly titled 30-Day Film, is exactly what it sounds like: 30 days worth of footage stitched together to form 7.5 minutes of disjointed cultural happenings.
The film, like the art it depicts, isn’t about constructing a cohesive narrative as much as it is about celebrating creativity in all its messiness. “In many ways our culture is based on finished products,” Aitken says. “I want to embrace the process and physicality of it and look at that perhaps as having value as opposed to something that’s completed and refined.”
Sound cool? It is. And we've got the whole thing for you to watch in all its dizzying glory. Check it out.
