Broken screen: a project by Doug Aitken.

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror," Marshall McLuhan wrote in The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), arguing that radical shifts in contemporary experience often go unarticulated because people remain attached to "the flavor of the most recent past"--and so in life recognize only the persistent afterimage of a familiar but disappeared world.

Doug Aitken's Broken Screen, a project for Artforum, might be considered a kind of living homage to McLuhan's popular handbook, in which the theorist paired his aphorisms with imagery appropriated from art and mass culture to magnify for readers the impact of technology on both human perception and society at large. During the past year, Aitken has interviewed filmmakers from Robert Altman and Kenneth Anger to Claire Denis and Mike Figgis, artists from Olafur Eliasson to Ed Ruscha, and such architects as Rem Koolhaas and Greg Lynn on the subject and, in particular, on the tendency toward nonlinearity in their respective fields. Are we now seeing a changed relationship between image and object? What observations should be made about contemporary modes of attention and communication, given the ever more common cinematic use of split screens and disjunctive or parallel narratives in movie theaters and fine-art venues alike?

This endeavor is clearly an extension of Aitken's work within the gallery context, where he regularly places his chosen medium, video, in an expanded field, mapping projections onto shaped screens to create a kind of animated sculpture and architecture. (The final spread in this project, in fact, reflects Aitken's recent experiments in origami, wherein a flat surface laced with photographic imagery is folded into a picture-sculpture.) Yet, as it appears in these pages, Broken Screen is perhaps best understood as a nonlinear narrative in which Aitken himself is the protagonist. He interviews his subjects while regularly traversing the globe (indeed, at press time, the artist's own studio is not sure whether he is in Japan or Portugal), and their exchanges assume different forms over time, with certain conversations excerpted or appearing alone and in their entirety in an array of international publications. Here, instead, they are seen together, inscribed by a life lived in a very contemporary sphere and finally edited, as it were, into the fabric of Aitken's visual enterprise.