Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Lannan Foundation.
2000.1
Doug Aitken's film, Diamond Sea is a cinematic panorama of the Namib Desert in Southwestern Africa. Aitken surveyed the riches of the region's diamond mines, which occupy 75,000 square kilometers of restricted access land named Diamond Areas 1 and 2. From air and land, he captures images of dilapidated buildings, rusting machinery, and empty interiors of the computer-automated complex, juxtaposing them with scenes of the desert and ocean.
Aitken spent a month exploring this remote location, which had been closed off to the outside world since 1908. The result is a portrait of a landscape, to which Aitken added a contrasting soundtrack of ambient techno music, superimposing popular culture on images of a place that for so long existed without it.
