October 23–December 13, 2009
Friday, October 23, 7–9pm: Opening reception
Friday, November 6, 7pm: Exhibition discussion with Joe Day and Eric Owen Moss

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is pleased to announce Blow x Blow, a new fall exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery by Los Angeles based firm deegan day design. This site specific installation investigates scripting and scripts as related to architecture and film and video.

Blow x Blow stages a bout between two trends in exhibition: gallery space as a site for installations designed by architects versus the use of the gallery space as the immersive realm of new media. To chart this collision, deegan day design, headed by principal and SCI-Arc design faculty member Joe Day, repurposes techniques of cinematic projection and scripting to spur new orders of spatial and structural sequencing, and new environments for projecting new media art.

Scripting has a brief history in contemporary architecture, but an extensive one in filmmaking. In film, the script dictates the pace and potential of unfolding drama and establishes the parameters of the cinematic effect. Computational scripting for 2-D and 3-D environments is more literal, in the sense that a “line” or command will simply be enacted, rather than interpreted by a director, cinematographer or actor. However, scripts of both kinds are written to elucidate a set of conditions – spatial, emotional or otherwise.

In this exhibition, deegan day design tests major advances that have developed in visual technologies and in the theorizing of visuality, or how we see, over the last two decades. The exhibition employs a series of interrelated scripting techniques – bounce-line diagramming, point-cage scripting, and bracketing – to unveil hidden cinematic potentials in the given environment.

Complementing the exhibition and screening for the initial two weeks is a film by Joe Day, Corrections + Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime, a study of prisons, museums and their complementary roles in contemporary high design and U.S. urban renewal. After a two week-run of Corrections + Collections, the installation will host work by leading artists working in new media in a series entitled Friends of Friends.

About Joe Day
Joe Day designs and writes in Los Angeles, where he leads deegan day design llc and teaches on the design faculty at SCI-Arc. He was born in 1967 in Berlin, Germany.

After receiving his undergraduate degrees in Architecture and Political Science from Yale University, Day completed his Masters of Architecture at SCI-Arc. He worked in the studios of Frank Israel, Robert Stern, Dagmar Richter, and HNTB before joining HEDGE Design Collective in 1996. In 1997, Day founded deegan day design llc, and in 1999, “dayware,” a clothing line for designers.

Day’s writing has been published in Architecture magazine, Interior Design, LoudPaper, and Latin American Architecture. He edited an AIA Award-winning monograph of Frank Israel (Rizzoli, 1992), wrote a new forward for the second edition of “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” by Reyner Banham (UC Press, 2009), and is currently working on a book that studies the roles played by prisons and museums in urban renewal.

Day has taught at Otis College of the Arts, UCLA and served as a visiting juror at Columbia, Rice, and the University of British Columbia. He served from 1995–2000 on the Board of Directors of the Los Angels Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and as its President in 2000. He currently is a member of the SCI-Arc Board of Directors, and a Director at the Keck Foundation.

About deegan day design
deegan day design llc blurs distinctions between disciplines and between personal and public realms. deegen day design llc specializes in the innovative “tailoring” of contemporary technologies with architectural methods modeled directly on the conventions of garment production, allowing pattern cuts of the exterior and interior cladding draped and fitted to variable structural frames. Projects include Ferrari Maserati Beverly Hills, the SWELL boutique in New York and residential work throughout Southern California.

SCI-Arc Gallery