11 October 2001 is a new ocean where we have never been. The difference is just a month, but a month expanded into a seamless time. Aitken's experiential show is now a new dawn of a world which in its race against itself, was beaten by its own speed, beaten by its own technology. “Our lives move through space like a burning ember,” Aitken wrote in an early treatment of New Ocean. While architecture collapses many times in Aitken's earlier work, Blow Debris, 2000, in New Ocean it remains intact yet abandoned; the few people around exist alone in an environment that seems to have survived an unspoken catastrophe. With dewdrops dripping down from destruction and anger, speed is frozen and a new sense of slowness overcomes once frantic lives. We have been stopped and new beginnings carry the impossible burden of so many endings. In silence, each drop echoes a tear and a voice.

'When you think about a personal experience, you are actually thinking about many smaller events which form the experience,” Aitken writes in the early stages of this new production.

Entering into Doug Aitken's space is an activity, which extends from the small-scale pleasures of appreciating the skilful organization and complex suggestiveness of a single image to the large-scale project of constructing a model that will impart unity to an entire experience. Like entering into a Joyce novel, we journey through a series of passages, not all of them equally amenable, picking our way through continually shifting perspectives, relying as best we can on our sensitivity.

The Serpentine Gallery is a classical space, its axes are clear and most exhibitions revolve, more or less, around the central dome at the epicentre both of the architecture and the art it usually contains.

But these architectural conventions have been either subverted or disrupted by Aitken's total intervention. The space is treated more like a virally infected organic form capable of attacking all of our senses.

Inside-outside, the slow revolution towards reality.

The main requisites for a visit to the Aitkenean mansion are a sharp eye and ear; and a willingness to abandon outside our own conventional awareness. The entrance is through the Serpentine Gallery's basement. Descending into the darkness of the Gallery's digestive apparatus the viewer begins a trip to the centre of Aitken's earth to resurface disoriented as if in the lost chamber of a temple of visual data. Ahead, like eyes seen from inside the skull of a giant idol, are the openings of a cave. The lonely, hesitant hero abandoning the shelter approaches the unknown light of a new reality.