Brooklyn Based Street Artist Swoon Builds A Musical House In New Orleans

Brooklyn based street artist Swoon is working with the city of New Orleans and New Orleans Air Lift to give residents a musical house. Swoon, who was recently featured in MOCA's "Art In The Streets" exhibition, wants to give back to a city that has contributed so much to culture. Swoon is collaborating with local musicians and artists to create a communal art experience.

View a video of the project below and to donate or become a sponsor click here.

From the project's Kickstarter:

From the salvaged remains of a decrepit Creole Cottage, the Brooklyn-based artist Swoon has re-imagined a permanent, interactive sculpture for the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. We call it the Dithyrambalina. It will look like a house, but it will function like a musical instrument. A growing group of local and national sound artists are working towards interactive instruments that can be built into its walls and floorboards so that visitors can bring the house to life through their touch. Ultimately, musicians will be invited to play the house, performing orchestrated works at block parties for their friends and neighbors. This project is for the love of New Orleans - its architecture, music, culture and its people.

Swoon has designed the look of house and we have formed coalitions with everyone from architects to salvage suppliers. The next phase of our project is to create instrumentation for the house. This Fall our sound artists will publicly test their prototypes in a temporary installation we are calling The Music Box - A Shantytown Sound Laboratory.

The obvious question to ask about this project is why? Swoon explains:

Even before the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had been afflicted by huge numbers of run down properties and abandoned lots. These tragic symbols are the backdrop of city-wide dysfunction, but they are also the tableau in front of which New Orleans’ rich musical and visual heritage parades and performs. This project is an imaginative attempt to redress the futility of this blight by finding within it vast resources of salvageable materials. By turning our salvaged construction into a music box that is free, public, and playful we are inviting the wider community to imagine and participate in a new landscape of potential and possibility.