DesCours 2008 sponsors
DesCours 2008 calendar of events
DesCours 2008 architects + artists
DesCours 2008 map + guide
DesCours 2008 media highlights
We would like to thank our 2008 sponsors for their generosity in helping make DesCours 2008 possible:
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport
Lowe's
The Azby Foundation
[ TBC Brass Band, 2008 ] All installation sites are open from Wednesday, December 10, 2008, through Sunday, December 14, 2008, from 6pm–10pm nightly, with the exception of 722 Toulouse Street (Site 11: Historic New Orleans Collection), which closes at 9pm nightly.
69pm: VIP/PRESS OPENING
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2008
68pm: REBIRTH BRASS BAND
722 Toulouse Street (Site 11: Historic New Orleans Collection)
Installation: TZ.CO. (Thaddeus Zarse + Clare Olsen)
810pm: KIDD JORDAN BAND
810 Common Street (Site 05: Varieties Alley)
Installation: AEDS (Ammar Eloueini)
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2008
68pm: WARDELL QUEZERQUE AND BAND
2 Canal Street (Site 6b: World Trade Center lobby)
Installation: IwamotoScott Architecture
810pm: GARY BROWN AND FEELINGS
1025 Orleans Street (Site 12)
Installation: Christophe Gauspohl + Luftwerk
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2008
68pm: EDDIE BO AND BAND
848 Carondelet Street (Site 03: Stevens Garage)
Installation: Marty McElveen
810pm: ERNIE ELLY AND BAND
419 Decatur Street (Site 08: Lafitte Information Center)
Installation: kmostudio
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2008
68pm: THE PINETTES BRASS BAND
Exchange Place (Site 07: between Bienville and Conti)
Installation: Khoury Levit Fong with Nashid Nabian
810pm: MICHAEL PIERCE AND BAND
531 Saint Louis Street (Site 09: Bevolo Lighting)
Installation: Marcella Del Signore + Frank Stevens
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2008
68pm: TREME BRASS BAND
832 North Rampart Street (Site 13)
Installation: the collaborative architecture factory (the-caf)
810pm: JAY MILES GRIGGS BAND
516 Chartres Street (Site 10: Pharmacy Museum)
Installation: Allison Kudla + Ryan Wolfe
AEDS (Ammar Eloueini)
The SW1 is a site specific installation created for a currently unused corridor site between two historical buildings in downtown New Orleans that was originally built and used as a public walkway. The installation for DesCours plays off of this historical reference and projects the idea of conceptually connecting spaces, both real and imaginary, through newly created shafts made to invite the visitors to imagine what this walkway could have been or perhaps what it was originally meant to be. The installation also creates a new environment made out of light that triggers the pedestrians and passers-by to recognize this space and to imagine it with a new potential.
the collaborative architecture factory (the-caf)
Systems of Artiface and Nature is based in the observation of the New Orleans region's paradoxical relationship with water. It proposes an investigation and juxtaposition of imagery and study of contextual artificial and natural cohabitation strategies as a platform for perspectives on place. The product of overlapping conditions provokes conceptual re-orderings of both formal and functional living in a wet-land. A comparison of artificial and natural wet-land mechanics reveals opportunities for continued envisioning, social and structural, of the New Orleans ecology; a merging of environments. This installation explores the potential through a projected research exhibit that frames information and intervention.
Marcella Del Signore + Frank Stevens
INFields is an artificial topography that redefines the traditional urban boundaries of public and private space. This installation consists of a system of programmed clusters that compress and expand the traditional thresholds associated with the urban courtyard condition. The result is a reinterpretation of conventional urban components into an integrated spatial network.
Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand
Within a transparent chamber filled with a gas-infused liquid, sound waves are directly transformed into light emissions by means of a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. While adapting to the absolute darkness surrounding the installation, one gradually perceives the detailed configurations of glowing sound fields. It is the artists intention to uncover this delicate bio-chemi-physical interface where the visible is the condition of the invisible (of the audible) and "where the inverse is also true, where invisibility [the disappearance of the observer in total darkness] is the condition of a new kind of visibility." A 'mirror-stage' emerges, removing the threshold between outer and inner space.
Christophe Gauspohl + Luftwerk
This site-specific installation explores the symbiotic relationship between the sky and water — both physically and symbolically addressing the paradigms of reflection and refraction. Working within the restrictive conditions of a hidden courtyard, a reflecting pool and a narrow path that leads you into the area, this piece plays with the idea of isolated connectivity through the use of a morphing fabric forms. Utilizing audio elements and motion projections, these forms walk you through a processional spatial narrative.
Graffiti Research Lab
This project encompasses the goal of the Graffiti Research Lab, which is to technologically empower individuals to creatively alter their surroundings on the scale of advertisers and the authorities in order to reclaim public space. While providing temporal but larger than life means of expression through utilizing technological means of image projection and real time interaction, this piece allows the public an opportunity to create, make and express in real time and through building-scale size imagery.
IwamotoScott Architecture
Voussoir Cloud explores the structural paradigm of pure compression coupled with an ultra-light material system. By beginning with a material operation of folding using small handmade models to test geometric relationships of bending along a curved seam, the design and construction process that followed focused on calibrating the relationship of digital model to physical corollary through iterative empirical testing. In the end, Voussoir Cloud attempts to defamiliarize both structure and material to create conflicted readings of normative architectural typologies. It is a light, porous surface made of compressive elements that creates atmosphere with these luminous wood pieces, and uses this to gain sensorial effects.
Khoury Levit Fong with Nashid Nabian
The installation consists of a collection of plastic molded stools, commonplace mass-produced products, that have been electronically enhanced to respond to color. Embedded technology allows each stool to pick up the color of the person who uses it and to imitate it in a chameleon-like fashion. When multiplied and tightly clustered, unoccupied stools pick up the neighbor's color. This results in a swarm-like behavior exhibiting emergent and unpredictable color patterns.
kmostudio
This exhibit is a play on the perception of scale and its relationship to the human experience. The winding path and changing panel heights create a sea of contextual facts generated from world statistics. By understanding the individual panels as singular objects, people move through at their own pace, creating individual experiences by absorbing some facts and skimming over others. At the end of the path one is directed to a set vantage point where they can observe others moving through the exhibit. It is here that the individual panels come together, creating a complete image from the grouping of all textual patterns. From this forced perspective, one is able to contemplate the relevance of the information while witnessing the movement of unknowing patrons against the backdrop of an abstracted worldview.
Allison Kudla + Ryan Wolfe
This installation in the Pharmacy Museum courtyard consists of a sensing mechanism recording changes in petri dishes containing the Earth's first oxygen-releasing microorganism — Cyanobacteria. This culture is printed into intricate patterns via a computer program and its changes in growth are then viewed via time lapse by a magnifying camera. Participants to the courtyard will be able to remotely control the mechanical armature to increase the amount of light and temperature given to any of the petri dishes, thereby causing the chosen micro-fields to grow faster and become more green over the course of the exhibition.
Marty McElveen
SeeYouSeeMe is an exploration into strategies for delineating the state of an ephemeral moment captured within an indeterminate space surrounded by indeterminate conditions. As a temporary intervention within an existing space, this installation provokes the participants to acknowledge memory while simultaneously evaluating their roles within the sequence of events taking place. In an attempt to capture and define how users interact with an architectural space, reflective material will be used as the surface of each cell to fragment one's spatial perception while interacting with the piece. The information processed through reflection, unlike a uniform mirrored surface, is dissimilated to the extent of one being able to experience a spatial collapse of the surrounding context. Spatial and temporal boundaries that exist within the space are reconsidered when repositioned within the work itself.
The Mutable Line Collaborative: Marianne Desmarais (artist/architect), Michelle Gay (drawing/digital media), and Liz Sargent (sculptor/fiber artist)
This installation, titled "a poem about water and dreaming — for new orleans," is a collaboration between three artists in three cities, developed into a dreamscape animation of arrival and departure. Vessels traverse mysterious landscapes and timeless days seeking a destination within a journey. The dreamscape, like casting a net in the sea of unknown, approaches the desire to navigate vastness with order and infinity with understanding. The artists each work with various media including fiber, drawing, ceramics, and digital technology. The animation flows from the intersection of these disparate disciplines and seeks connections within a non-linear trajectory. Lines expand, shift, drop off, and draw themselves out in endless undulations as the artwork transcends technology towards a poetic gesture.
Nano
This installation invites people to look into windows that activate the busts of philosophers, entertainers, rulers, and scientists both ancient and modern, turning the street into a living museum. Viewers can enliven the likes of Mark Twain, Kanye West, Henry Ford, Jay-Z, Einstein, Plato, Bill Gates, Augustus Caesar, Jacques Derrida, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Cousteau, Julia Child, Queen Elizabeth, Max Headroom, George Clinton, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Sun Ra, and, in fact, all of Planet Earth, and, if you're extremely patient, the entire universe.
TZ.CO. (Thaddeus Zarse + Clare Olsen)
Petal Project 5 seeks to exploit the anticipatory quality of the hidden courtyard as well as the collective and durational aspects of the event through a changeable petalscape. The event space design is a response to the existing lushness of the courtyard through an integration of petal-form seating and lighting. Informed by the colorful exuberance yet paper-thin quality of pentamerous hibiscus flowers that grow throughout Louisiana, the petalscape is colorful yet subtle in scale, not competing but assimilating with the existing courtyard. Programmatically, the primary aspiration is to create an adaptable, collective lounge space. The small scale of the moveable furniture-like petals facilitates instantaneous manipulations for social gatherings at various scales. Capable of close-packing like a bud before bloom or scattering to form a landscape of discrete pieces, the configuration will not only affect the social ambience, but also the illumination of the space. With embedded light strands, each petal will emit a subtle glow, but when nested together, the collective petalscape will produce a more intense luminosity.
Click link below to download PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader — download Acrobat Reader free from Adobe).
DesCours 2008 map + guide (~4.0MB; original dimensions 16" × 24")
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Architect Magazine, August 2008: Award, "Hover" (p. 58)
Gambit Weekly, October 28, 2008: Downtown Development District ad (p. 58)
New Orleans Homes and Lifestyles, November 2008: full-page ad (inside back cover)
St. Charles Avenue, November 2008: full-page ad
Gambit Weekly, November 25, 2008: quarter-page ad (p. 66)
New Orleans Magazine, November 2008: full-page ad
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New Orleans Homes and Lifestyles, December 2008: full-page ad (inside back cover)
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Where Magazine, December 2008: p. 13
Gambit Weekly, December 2, 2008: 8-page insert guide
Architectural Record, December 2008: quarter-page ad (p. 223)
Times-Picayune (New Orleans), December 9, 2008: "Hidden New Orleans," by Molly Reid ("Living" Section, front page)
Gambit Weekly, December 9, 2008: photo and article by Will Coviello (p. 41)
Gambit Weekly, December 9, 2008: event listing (p. 69)
Louisiana Life, January/February 2009: full-page ad (inside back cover)
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NOTV editorial, airing 11/13/08–12/14/08
WWNO-89.9FM, interview with Diane Mack, 12/9/08
KBON-101.1FM, interview with Herman Fuselier, 12/8/08
AIA New Orleans DesCours 2008 at AIA New Orleans – Arts & Crafts – Big Fun On The Bayou
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