Sleepwalkers Trailer

This is the trailer made to accompany media artist Doug Aitken's multi-screen project "Sleepwalkers" from 2007.

Since 2000, the number of projected multi-channel or single channel displays of video art projects has grown exponentially in museums both in the United States and abroad, with large-scale image spectacles drawing viewers back into institutions whose power and significance in the 1990s was definitely on the wane. One prime example of this trend is the project situated in New York’s Museum of Modern Art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden between West 53rd and 54th Streets in Manhattan from January 16 to February 12 2007. On the walls encasing the garden were gigantic moving images projected onto six facades between 5:00 and 10:00 p.m. every evening. The films, part of what the artist Doug Aitken calls a “broken screen” narrative (from a book of the same title), chronicle the lives of five characters as they move through the city at night.  The Web site accompanying the project noted, “These characters provide a blueprint for the metropolis as a living, breathing organism fueled by the desires, energies and ambitions of its inhabitants.” The description continues, explaining that “Aitken pioneers a site-specific cinema, expanded into the urban landscape and keyed to the pedestrian experience.” Visitors were invited to stroll around the silent film to see all six 11-minute segments and the large images, with many of them close-ups that exacerbated the sense of enormity of the faces and figures of the characters, were visible from blocks away from the museum. The title of the project was "Sleepwalkers."

The fast-paced 60-second trailer highlighted here was posted on YouTube in hopes of generating interest. The syncopated images rotate through the five characters and specific motions, suggesting contiguity and similarity. However, the repetition of the characters, gestures and spaces also suggests the notion of a database, and, to use the phrasing of Lev Manovich, embodies the act of mapping the paradigm on the syntagm. In this case, the paradigmatic elements are the characters, who are mapped across a day-long narrative timeline. This sense of "mapping," of showing the range of options for each position on the timeline, is emblematic of a database narrative form.

Another take on Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers

A more critical take on Doug Aitken's over-hyped Sleepwalkers project

While it's true that Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers project was a spectacle that graced some of Manhattan's most privileged neighborhoods and doubtless enriched the lives of many already rich New Yorkers, as an example of "public" art, it's shameless celebration of bourgeois lifestyle is unforgivably apolitical in the midst of an era characterized by war, economic collapse and increasing disparities between rich and poor. A far more radical approach to public video projection may be found in work that actually deals with issues of relevance to the people of New York City, not just an elite few.