By Dean Kuipers

The subtext to our electrified, Webbed, and 'Netted world is that electricity itself is information. It is behavior. It is history. It is the fluid shared by our old, flesh-and-blood bodies and whatever brave new e-dentities that may be emerging. Human nerves and circuit boards carry the same current. Doug Aitken's new installation "Electric Earth" featured in the prestigious Spring 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, makes the unseen link between the electrified texture of our urban environment and the nervous beat of our own bodies. This is the beginning of a critical dialogue on the electron as not only the "E" energizing e-everything, but the most universal of psychic materials.

"I am an essentialist," says 31 year-old Aitken. "I wanted to come to terms with something that was completely generic, a terrain that was nowhere and everywhere." And utterly mesmerizing. A viewer walking into the first room of Aitken's multiple-projection, 8-laserdisc work is confronted with "Electric Earth's protagonist, eccentric dancer Ali "Giggi" Johnson, lying on a nondescript bed with a TV remote in his hand.

His "now" then reveals itself as a series of interactions with everyday electricalism as Johnson, an astounding pop-lock breakdancer, strolls through an interzone of deserted urban landscapes, from the neon lights of a carwash to the fluorescence reflected in a store window full of sports trophies to a dollar moving in and out of a disembodied Coke machine.

Johnson's twitching, stylized spasms when confronted with these devices suggest that his (and our) cultural responses (like dance) are partly the internalized rhythms of the electrified world. His deadpan affect as the world around him gradually accelerates also suggests that this is ain't no party, this ain't no disco, but rather a glimpse of our existential condition. "The absolute present is unattainable," says Aitken. "If it is, maybe for only a fleeting moment. The things in the protagonist's environment continue at their own rhythm."

That absolute present is identity. What are we when our own responses - the twitching of our own nerves - may be a reflection of an environmental pulse? "It's subconscious movement," Aitken says of Johnson's ghostly, unnerving dance. "I wanted to find an area that wasn't dance, really, but repetitious machine movement, very precise. It's a hybrid, a fusion of gestures, reactions and learned motion forms."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]