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My
work uses a range of media, including audio, film, photography, and digital
animation to foreground the unpredictable and often hapless ways in which
the individual navigates urban space. Architectural discourse and the
figure of the architect have remained a consistent focus, as has architecture
in the metaphorical sense defined by Bataille: as that which is ordered
and ordering in any system, from the social to the psychological.
I
have produced a series of site-specific audio installations based upon
interviews with architects that are presented as radio ‘documentaries’.
The projects have, on the one hand, been concerned with bringing the absent
figure of the architect back into the spaces they have designed for us.
At the same time, their particular use of documentary formats mitigates
against any authoritative account: by only playing back at the site where
they have been recorded (their ‘broadcasts’ emanating no further
than the site’s four walls), the pieces retain a sense of play and
ultimately elude verification.
Recent
work has sought to develop this approach toward a broader context. A series
of pieces take 'open 24 hours' as an abstracting ideological account of
the modern city, and seek to expose and test it through the use of a range
of strategies and media. 'A Little Oracle', an audio installation completed
in 2004, extends the geographic, colonial, and psychological themes of
a James Joyce short story into physical space through the use of radio
broadcast technology. And a trilogy of 16mm short films unfold a series
of micro-dramas around architectural sites in New York City.
Through
the use of humor and the foregrounding of minor narratives that
inhabit - yet contradict - established discourses, these projects seek
to explore ways in which meaning in the urban context is constructed
temporally, in ever-shifting relation with the body of those who use
its spaces.
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