It’s not easy to translate 20 years of an artist’s work into a single book. It’s even harder if that artist happens to prefer the more ephemeral mediums of artistry. Doug Aitken is best known for his engrossing multimedia installations. He’s projected films against the facade of the MoMA (Sleepwalkers), and did the same at the Hirshhorn Museum (Song1). He’s dug a crater in the floor of a New York gallery (100 Yrs), constructed a sound pavilion in the Brazilian jungle to listen to the earth’s rumbles (Sonic Pavilion) and orchestrated Station to Station, the cross-country train trip that held pop-up events in nine different cities last year.

All this is to say, you kinda had to be there. To appreciate Aitken's work, you have to see it, hear it, and feel it, which which makes it a particularly difficult challenge to lasso the feelings and aesthetics of his oeuvre onto paper pages. And yet, that’s exactly what Aitken did with his newly released monograph, 100 Yrs.

The nearly 300-page book looks back at Aitken’s work through a series of visual essays curated and organized by art world luminaries such as curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesco Bonami. The book explores the big ideas that Aitken has worked through in many of his pieces. Most notably, the architecture of narrative. Many of Aitken's works toy with the idea of time and how we experience it. You can see this in his Mirror installation at the Seattle Art Museum, for which Aitken recorded hundreds of hours of video and sounds from the city. The film is projected on the museum’s facade, as the old footage is rearranged in real time to reflect current inputs like pedestrian traffic and weather conditions. “That’s something I've always believed very strongly, that the human experience is the sum of all these fragments,” says Aitken. “All these pieces and particles—it’s not just one long story with a start and finish.”

For the book, many of Aitken’s sprawling digital works have been distilled down to snapshots. Each photo conveys the same moody surrealism as Aitken's live events. It’s clearly a reductionist way to interpret any kind of artwork, but it's also extremely efficient at getting to the essence of a piece. “If you create any kind of installation or artwork in that vein, really all that ever lasts through time is the documentation,” he says. “The documentation becomes the narrative.”

In that way, 100 Yrs is an effort to slow down a piece’s lifespan. It was also a chance for Aitken himself to slow down. The artist says he’s never been one to hold onto pieces—when they’re done they’re done. “I’ve never looked back. I've never been aware that I have a shadow as I’m moving,” he says. “When I started the project, it was really the first time in my life where I was forced almost to recognize that I had made anything other than yesterday.”

You can buy 100 Yrs here.