Curious Orange

“Curious Orange” explores the image and identity of Orange County, as expressed in the physical landscape of the region. The objective of this project is to refocus the image of Orange County through site research and interpretation through digital technology. Sites will be selected from the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s site archive, and presented in a dynamic, digital medium at the Beall Center.

Changing Our Perspective

Curious Orange is the result of a year-long research project into Orange County, conducted by the Center for Land Use Interpretations at the behest of the Beall Center for Art and Technology. It is a re-presentation of the county, a suggested re-definition of this remarkable and superlative place. “The CLUI operates under the assumption that landscape--the shared space of the earth’s surface--is society’s literal ‘common ground,’” says Matt Coolidge, CLUI’s project manager for Orange County, “and our objective is to better understand the world we live in by examining human interaction with the land."

The Center for Land Use Interpretation seeks to better understand the world we live in by examining human interaction with the land. Through field research, public exhibits, extrapolative projects, and interactive methods of analysis, the Center encourages the formation of new perspectives on the shared space of Earth.

"Human behavior, enacted principally through the systems of economic and political endeavor, leaves its mark on this perpetually mutating realm,” Coolidge continues. “These marks are the contemporary physical vestiges of our culture, and can be examined, described, classified, and sorted like archaeological specimens, and used to reconstruct a theory of the present. This practice of extrapolation is the process of extracting raw sites out of the continuum of space and applying the subjective tools of interpretation to construct a narrative description of a place.”

Curious Orange is such a narration, composed of the combination of iconic sites selected from the landscape of Orange County. These sites will be presented in an immersive, moving picture display, flooding the Beall Center gallery through a digital projection system, controlled by the viewer using a “clickable” map of the county. The project is similar to programs CLUI has done about other regions at other locations, including the Hinterland program at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (1997), 100 Places in Washington at the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle (1999), and Commonwealth of Technology, at the List Visual Arts Center, MIT (1999).