This is not an everyday performance by the Kansas City Marching Cobras. The esteemed American drill team’s thunderous sequence is just one of 61 films that make up Station to Station, a wildly ambitious movie-cum-art-project by Californian artist Doug Aitken, premiering tomorrow at Sundance Film Festival, the snow-capped celebration of independent film in Utah's Park City.
As part of the festival’s New Frontier programme, Station to Station is a dizzying mosaic of stories that Aitken cooked up on a conceptual railroad ride from New York to San Francisco with artists including Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore and Giorgio Moroder.
“Trains are almost forgotten in America and our route snaked throughout the country, stopping in big cities but also in places like Winslow, Arizona—a little speck on the map,” says Aitken, whose micro films also act as trailers ahead of screenings across Sundance. “At each stop we staged happenings that merged contemporary art, film, music, food. I wanted to make things nomadic, remove people from the security of their studios or their cities."
The unorthodox and uplifting results of Aitken's voyage typify the best of the programme. And is he equipped for the ice at one of the few cultural gatherings on earth where dying of hypothermia is not out of the question? “I am looking forward to the day they launch Equatorial Sundance,” he says.
Tom Horan is Culture Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.
Sundance Film Festival runs through February 1. New Frontier at Sundance Institute identifies and fosters independent artists working at the convergence of film, art, media, live performance, music and technology.