If traditional Earthworks were about treating the landscape as a sculpture capable of being reshaped, born from a desire to escape the noisy commercialism of the time, Aitken’s approach is to construct his own landscape, a visual and sonic architecture that takes the form of a video display. And rather than running from the commotion, he chooses to embrace the language of an information-saturated world and become an interpreter of it. The artist tells PLANET that “Altered Earth,” a site-specific work set in the Camargue, the marshy region along the Mediterranean coast of Provence, was motivated by questions of how we see things within today’s heightened reality.

“I was thinking about this notion of, do we have a different conception toward our exterior world?” he explained in an interview. “Do we see things in a way that is more fragmented, as opposed to the straight story or the bigger plot?”

What visitors to the exhibition in Arles, France will see is a reflection of that splintering, as something resembling a supernatural travel video fills the 12 screens assembled in the Grande Halle of the Parc de Ateliers, each one of them measuring 30 feet. Aitken says he found inspiration in the Camargue, a place known for its flamingos and salt mines, because of the friction he witnessed between the deep ecology at work and signs of contemporary society.

The disparate pieces he saw rubbing together formed an energy that he was anxious to capture and replicate by creating an interior landscape of video loops, as he did in the earlier “Electric Earth.”