Shanta Lee Gander: I once read something about how to consistently enter into the state of lucid dreaming, and one of the things suggested was something like walking around and not treating it like you are awake, but treat it like a dream state.
Doug Aitken: I see the world almost as if everything is being edited all the time, as if my eyes are lenses and I am cropping and zooming.
Gander: It still feels that surreal to me.
Aitken: In some ways that is the value of culture.
Gander: This was very key in re-defining the term as we know it as well.
•••
Aitken: I am speaking to you from Venice Beach, one block away from the Pacific Ocean.
Gander: I could see being on an island just sitting somewhere surrounded by the scenery, the water, in the lap of nature while giving a reading.
Aitken: Everyone has a different collage of what reality is.
Gander: An example of this was the way that people would appear and disappear from our lives.
Aitken: They become part of something larger.
•••
Gander: This all being said, again, I could not think about this while in the thick of doing the actual creating.
Aitken: The soil, the sun, the rain, all of this can create something vital.
Gander: Also, some say that some of these things are traumatic.
Aitken: I think what is coming out of it is an attempt to create a different kind of language.
Gander: Yes, it is almost like an obsession.