The last time we heard from the multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken, he was hosting Station to Station, a "nomadic happening" aboard a passenger train traveling from New York to San Francisco, which saw a diverse group of artists, musicians, writers and thinkers stage events in cities across the country. At this year's Sundance Film Festival, he's presenting the North American premiere of another group project that explores the nature of creativity, the Source. Several years in the making (an early version appeared in 2012 at the Tate Liverpool), it's a series of candid four-minute video conversations with several dozen noteworthy figures about their creative process. T presents exclusive samples of nine of Aitken's conversations with subjects including Alice Waters (pictured), James Turrell and Tilda Swinton. More... At Sundance, the series will be presented at a special pavilion on Main Street; meanwhile, a new interactive website for the project will allow viewers to follow the thematic connections among the various conversations. Throughout the course of Sundance, T will exclusively present clips of nine of Aitken's conversations for the Source - with Tilda Swinton, Liz Diller, Paolo Soleri, James Turrell, Theaster Gates, Aaron Koblin, Alice Waters, Liz Glynn and Beck. To see them, visit our project page for the Source, where we'll be rolling them out one at a time over a two-week span. Below, Aitken talks about why he embarked on the project, and what he hopes it can accomplish. What was the source of the Source? It was a project that I started on my own with no real direction, really. You would find that it's the end of the year, it's New Year's Eve, and you look back and say, "What happened this last year? What's really of value? Often there's nothing of material consequence, but maybe if you look back you recognize that there were a few conversations that you had with people you were fascinated by. I was thinking, is there a way that I could capture these moments, or excavate them, or stage them? These moments of ideas that flow out in a very raw and direct way but when they're frozen on film you can go back and look back and think about them, and also explore the connectivity between other things that you find in culture. Did some of the same creative energy that went into Station to Station go into the Source? There's a shared dialogue with Station to Station and the Source, but the Source is removing what is created. It's going back to the bedrock of who you are and what you're doing. It's about going back before anything was created and looking at the shared dialogue. You hear Jack White talking about growing up next to a Detroit factory, and how the rhythm of the factory informed all the rhythms that he plays. At the same time, you'll find a musician like Terry Riley in his late 70s talking about the idea of patterns and repetition and how that makes so much more sense to him. In an instant, you see a bridge between radically different musicians sharing a single symptom that becomes the starting point for what they do. For me, the name the Source means where creativity begins. Is that what you were thinking? I see it as trying to reduce and reduce and reduce. Bringing things back to a candid and immediate conversation between two people. Having something that has very little filtration, that is not reprocessed by a critic and is not repurposed through the filter of cultural history. When you're having these conversations, do you feel like an journalist or a curator? Or is it just one artist talking directly to another? In some ways, I saw it as moving back to the roots of conceptual art. When you look at the conceptual movement in the "60s, early "70s, you see that artists are moving toward a sense of purity, a sense of reductionism, trying to get at what the idea is without all the formalism and aesthetics that surround it. I was hoping with this could be a 21st-century project looking at the pure idea at the core of what's made. Were you guided purely by your enthusiasms in reaching out to people to participate? The project was born out of curiosity. After awhile it created its own language. After you talk to three people, to six people, you start finding maybe there's a certain idea that comes up over and over. You sit down with Philippe Pareno, an amazing artist, and all of a sudden he's talking about the same thing James Turrell's talking about. The project created this living dialogue that opened up all these doors and passageways, all these connections. Watching a few, I was struck by the idea that successful creative people rely on clearly delineated systems and processes. It's not divine inspiration, it's work. Did that strike you? Sounds very Malcolm Gladwell. 10,000 hours! Exactly. Yeah, add a few more. You do find that everyone has created their very personal system, whether they have this rigid structure and it's about repetition, or it's someone who is looking at chance and chaos. There's an awareness of what your system is. You can make with it and you can break with it. It's yours and you can do with it as you please. Certain individuals have more of an awareness of how they work, and then you find others who work, but through the repetition of what they do, they start to discover things about themselves. There's also a lot of disciplines breaking down and bleeding into one another. You have Richard Phillips talking about making paintings based on media images through a process that he likens to architecture. Was that interdisciplinary instinct something you tried to draw out? What surprises me, actually, is that culture isn't more fluid with all the different mediums that exist. I'm constantly surprised how you see this regimentation between contemporary art here, existing primarily with the museums and galleries, and music is over there in this strange, archaic music industry. But at the same time it's fascinating, "cause if you and I were to sit down we would talk about all of these things. We would talk about music and cinema, architecture, art. In the actual popular discussion, there's really no division. Within the capitalistic system, that's where the division lies. I wanted to have something that was just about, in a very simple, humble way, someone talking in their own language about what they did. In the process you actually find that there's this incredible amount of cross-pollination. How much time did you spend with each of these folks to produce these four-minute interviews? Generally, these were much longer conversations. But I wanted to distill them. I wanted to have one format that was four minutes. I wanted them to be candid but very focused. I was looking at a cultural landscape where the ideas that often really travel are the ideas that are condensed and tight - they're crystalline sound bites. I didn't want that hour-and-a-half lecture format, but something that was a really tight road trip through modern ideas. What will the physical manifestation of this project at Sundance look like? What you have is a circular pavilion. It's like a pie almost, divided into six parts. When one walks in, there are six films playing, all with their own audio, each one four minutes, and then six more replace those. It allows you to walk in and, if you're engaged with Liz Diller talking about architecture, you can be immersed in that, and you can step into that section of the installation and follow that thread. The physical installation is mirrored in the website that we've designed. As you navigate it, you can find certain ideas and follow those ideas if you wish. Imagine if you are listening to Jacques Herzog talking about chaos, and you say, I'm kind of interested in that thread, so you follow "chaos" and it leads you to Ryan Trecartin. What kind of life will it live after Sundance? Will there be more physical installations? Are you going to keep collecting these conversations? It's an ongoing project. It's not finished. Hopefully, over the next few years we can to add to it and create a more dynamic and a wider range of individuals who are a part of it. Is there any one lesson you can distill from all of these conversations? Don't drink caffeine! No, this is one of the projects that for me on a personal level makes life vital, that allows you to feel a connection with the people around you. I was really humbled by the generosity of everyone in the project, and the openness to talk in a way that was often very raw, very unmediated, without the thought that there was a camera or that this was for the public, but that this was a conversation between two people. Interview has been edited and condensed.