The project is a design-build stage environment for the TEDx Bozeman 2014 “Pioneer Spirit” event. The event featured 14 innovators on the national and international stage, with ties to southwestern Montana, presenting the “talk of their lives.”
The stage environment design (re)presents one of the most alluring aspects of southwestern Montana — the topography. The topography challenges, provokes, and awes. It engages our most adventurous and risky desires. To understand this context is to begin to understand the underlying force that a place can have on an individual.
Contour maps and sectional grid lines of the Gallatin valley were superimposed on an exaggerated aerial perspective to create a new multi-viewpoint model. The new 3D pattern and terrain, simultaneously familiar and ambiguous, were milled into 17 four-by-eight-foot sheets of two-inch-thick blue board insulation. The sheets were precisely panelized to puzzle together along selected property lines. The assembly was suspended with nylon wire from overhead riggings. Lighting was designed to allow a range of visual effects, from exaggerated contours to muted swirls, giving a gradient of contexts to feature the presenters for the live performance and for the high definition video recordings streamed and posted to the web.