The Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Marciano Art Foundation in collaboration with artist Doug Aitken, today announced details of the innovative multimedia artwork Lightscape, which will receive its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 16th, 2024, with a live-topicture performance featuring the Los Angeles Master Chorale with the LA Phil New Music Group led by Grant Gershon, Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director of the Master Chorale.
The performance is part of PST Art: Art & Science Collide and the LA Phil’s daylong new music festival Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings.
Following the Walt Disney Concert Hall premiere, Lightscape will be showcased as a large-scale immersive installation at the Marciano Art Foundation from December 17th, 2024 through March 15th, 2025. Within MAF’s large-scale Theater Gallery, the installation will consist of a multi-screen film installation and an original immersive soundscape. As viewers navigate the labyrinthine design, they will encounter different parts of the Lightscape narrative. The installation will foster a modern form of storytelling—where non-linear storylines empower the viewer to discover and create their own experience.
During this exhibition run, MAF will host weekly activations of live musical happenings inside the installation by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Philharmonic. Lightscape is centered around opportunities that invite live music, dance, and performance to further delve into its modern mythology and reimagines our collective notions of the future.
Lightscape is an innovative multimedia artwork created by the artist Doug Aitken in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. At the core of the work is a feature-length film, a multi-screen fine art installation, and a series of live musical performances. Lightscape creates a modern mythology asking the questions, “where are we now?” and “where are we going?”.
Lightscape is a captivating, hallucinatory portrait of the contemporary world, addressing a future hovering on the horizon. Accelerating through the diverse landscapes of the American West Coast like a sinuous, lucid dream, the narrative seamlessly flows from character to character, almost entirely without language or conventional dramatic structure. Instead, we move through an unpredictable series of interconnected encounters always driven by sound and music. The characters of Lightscape are in constant motion, navigating a wild, beautiful and at times, haunting modern world.
Music is at the core of Lightscape. The soundtrack weaves together original compositions created by Doug Aitken with Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale and orchestral pieces performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with LA Phil Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel. The vocal music uses reductive language, words and phrases that repeat and overlap into abstraction. Like a musical kaleidoscope, the film sonically shifts gears between these original vocal pieces to works by iconic minimalists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk. The core soundtrack is augmented with ambient soundscapes composed for the film by Doug Aitken, Beck, and others.
Lightscape portrays the landscape of the American West Coast in all of its diversity. From the desolate reaches of Death Valley, to futuristic automated robotics factories, to Richard Neutra’s tranquil mid-century architecture, Lightscape restlessly navigates these different ecologies and vivid landscapes.
The cast of Lightscape encompasses a wide cross-section of culture. It features artists from the Los Angeles Master Chorale and LA Phil as well as diverse talent including members of LA Dance Project, Krumpers from LA’s street-dance subculture, and actors such as Natasha Lyonne. Musicians Beck, the folk-soul trio La Lom, and 84-year-old funk legend James Gadson make cameos. In the fragmented narrative of Lightscape, there is a sense of connectivity where one character’s perspective seamlessly merges with the next, creating a prismatic view of the modern experience. Lightscape challenges us to reconsider our perceptions of progress as we hurtle into an unknown technological future.
MORE: lightscapeart.org
Lightscape is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between Doug Aitken, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The project is generously supported by the Marciano Art Foundation; an anonymous donor; the Arison Arts Foundation; Joni and Miles Benickes; the Hillenburg Family. Lightscape is part of Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings, a daylong festival of new music that is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty.
About the artist
Doug Aitken is an artist whose work explores every medium; from sculpture, film and installations to architectural interventions. His films often explore the modern condition, and his installations create immersive cinematic experiences. He has collaborated with numerous artists and musicians and his artwork has been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries around the world. The “Sleepwalkers” exhibition at MoMA in 2007 covered the museum’s exterior walls with moving-image projections. In 2012 SONG 1 wrapped the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC with a 360-degree panoramic video projections. Mirage, a site-specific sculpture that takes the form of a home completely covered in mirrors and set in the heart of the Californian desert was installed in 2017. It has also been installed in Detroit, MI (2018) and in Gstaad, Switzerland (2019-2021). In July 2019 he launched the project New Horizon, a multifaceted art event challenging the notion of art in the 21st-century. The project was composed of a series of live events across the state of Massachusetts, centered around a stunning reflective hot air balloon and gondola. In 2022, a large scale survey of his artwork was featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
