Mark Orange - selected art projects
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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.