NEW SKIN, 2001

4 oval screens,
4 video projectors, 1 synchroniser,
8 loudspeakers,
2 videos, PAL, color, quadraphonic sound, (Engl.) (Fr.
s.t.) 20’
Produced by new media dpt, Centre Pompidou


New Skin was produced by the Centre Pompidou in the context of the “Sonic Process” exhibition, which studied relationships between sound art and the visual arts. On that occasion, Doug Aitken created an installation exploring in a fictional way the relationship between our senses of sight and hearing and how it is conceived in our memory.
Two oval screens intersecting to form a cross are suspended in the centre of a dark room, with the image visible from both sides of each screen. This set-up allows Aitkin to present visitors with four two-sided screens, visible throughout the exhibition space, and thus invite them to move around them. The soundtrack uses multi-channel surround sound, a system which improves the quality of the sound through the distribution of several sources in space.
The video begins with a close-up of a digital clock countdown. A young Asian woman (who will remain anonymous) then makes her appearance, in her apartment in Tokyo. She is seated in the centre of a room filled with magazines, books and objects. Expressing herself through a voice-over, she tells us that she is gradually going blind and trying to fill herself with images before it is too late. She frenetically goes through the archives she has constituted in her inner world.
One key phrase punctuates her statement: 'The more I see, the less I believe in the images I find.' The prospect of her imminent loss of sight pushes the heroine of the video to a continuous search for new information, but this appetite for knowledge makes her lose part of her earlier memories. Aitken uses this paradox to express the non-linear way that memory functions, given its inability to assimilate an infinity of new data.
The editing of the video gradually changes: the shots follow one another at an increasingly rapid rhythm. The long shots circling around the young women give way to shorter sequences (of night-time industrial landscapes, for example), intercut with images of the digital counter from the beginning of the tape. This acceleration recalls the inevitable disappearance of the heroine's sight.
Aitken gradually introduces video effects: freeze frame, overlaying of objects on the screen, appearance and disappearance of certain parts of the shot, split screen. A bicycle in a deserted street, for example, disappears little by little from the screen, or the young woman sees her image vanish from the reflection in the mirror. These effects bring about the decay of the protagonist's world and force her into a space which is increasingly small.
The narrator's monologue is accompanied by a musical score which becomes more and more present as the images grow more complex. Like the young Asian woman, we find our sense of hearing increasingly drawn to this dreamlike music. Aitken also superimposes sound effects on the visual effects. The group of friends with whom the young woman is shown eating around a table disappear one by one and their conversation fades out to the point of becoming background noise.
At the end of New Skin, the digital clock arrives at zero and the video starts a new loop. Aitken is trying to give the visitor the subjective experience of the deterioration of the optical system.

Laetitia Rouiller
Translation and adaptation Miriam Rosen