Doug Aitken

NightLight was thrilled to support artist Doug Aitken on his 2025 show at Regen Projects. Psychic Debris Field is a hallucinatory mashup of Southern California ecology and the inescapable imprint of human presence, and is a companion to his multichannel media installation Lightscape. NightLight previously assisted Doug Aitken Workshop with LED sculptures including 3 Modern Figures (don’t forget to breathe), Flag (without borders), Twilight Triptych, and Vanishing Point, and came aboard to tackle the challenge of the full room immersive installation collectively titled CONTACT (for Dagny).

NightLight’s work includes the technical design, programming, wiring, and installation of all LED lighting elements within the sculptures, as well as creative content design and programming for the lighting choreography, and custom previsualization tools.

In all, 2 stags (4 individual antlers), 3 pigeons, 6 cactus bases, an illuminated icebox, a 4K bus stop digital signage monitor, and a row of theatrical strip lights are animated together in an 18-minute continuous loop synced with multichannel audio playback. Each of the two central stag sculptures is controlled wirelessly and powered by an enclosed battery, ensuring that their ethereal presence isn’t interrupted by the sight of cables and plugs.

In order to develop the lighting choreography on the project timeline—prior even to the fabrication of many of the sculptures—NightLight’s media team leveraged Unreal Engine to create a fully-programmable realtime previsualization of the room. This enabled Mr. Aitken to preview the entire installation in a virtual environment alongside NightLight animators, crafting a visual score across the various sculptures like a symphony conductor commanding sections of an orchestra.

From Regen Projects:

In “Psychic Debris Field,” Aitken sets forth a poly-media composition of artworks that create a narrative which explores the juxtaposition of deep ecological history within our landscape and contemporary habitation. The artworks create a fever-dream interpretation of our landscape ranging from large-scale sculptures created from urban debris, light and sound installations, botanic artworks, and fabric works that seamlessly combine these mediums.

In the second room, an encompassing installation generates a tableau of the North American landscape which deploys light, a vocal original composition, and sculpture in an immersive choreography. This room is dramatically darker, and as the viewer’s eyes adjust, a primary central sculpture of two large stags colliding, their interlocking horns glowing with an ever-changing radiating light, becomes clear. Other figures then emerge: cacti crafted from rusted Cor-ten steel; an ice machine containing live cactus plants; a bus stop; indigenous birds — all suggesting a mysterious, variegated landscape. Here, the material and dematerial flow through an infinite range of auditory, visual, and spatial possibilities. As the lighting changes, the song cycle progresses to form a haunting liminal space that appears to exist somewhere between the natural and built environments. The composition of light and sound become our narrative structure as the sculptures within the space speak to each other in a surreal connectivity.