Pall Thayer was born in 1968 in Austin, Texas, USA. He is half
American and half Icelandic and has spent most of his life in
Iceland. He began his serious art studies at the Reykjavik School
of Arts in 1986. At the same time he had just formed his first band
along with some close friends. Since then, he has studied art and
played music in Iceland, the USA and Finland finally graduating
from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (now the Icelandic
Academy of the Arts) in 1999.
Having begun as a painter, with painterly aspirations, Pall's
big conversion to computers came while a guest student at the
Helsinki Academy of Art in Finland in 1997. Although Pall had been
using computers and programming since about 1983, he hadn't quite
accepted them yet as an artistic tool. However, in Finland he was
introduced to an assortment of software and hardware that allowed
for programmable, multi-user interaction and this was exactly what
he was waiting for.
Since 1997 Pall has created a variety of audio-visual
installations and web-based work involving multi-user interaction.
The main theme throughout his work is visual abstraction, something
left over from his days as a painter. However now this involves
obscure interfaces that allow the public to participate in the
creation of abstract visuals without actually letting them know how
everything works or how what they do may effect the imagery. This
is his method for maintaining the abstract. It's hard to draw a
simple house if you're not the only one controlling the pencil.
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AD: When you developed PANSE did you see yourself making a new musical instrument?
PT: No, the musical instrument portion of my work is usually a sort of crutch I
use for other purposes. What I'm more interested in is finding out how
people actually end up interacting with this sort of thing and by providing
visuals that go with the music, I'm interested in finding out what drives
the interaction. Are people more interested in messing around with the
visuals, regardless of what happens to the music or vice versa? Personally I
find that the musical aspect enhances the visuals tremendously and that's
pretty much why I create projects in the form of musical instruments.
AD: PANSE differs from conventional
audio software in that it is collaborative and easily
used from a Web browser. Is it significant that you're
involving people in making their own compositions rather
than downloading someone else's music? What are some pros and
cons of this approach?
PT: The way I see it, they aren't making their own compositions. It's hard for
anyone to place ownership on any portion of the music that PANSE generates.
I've often been asked why I don't record some of the audio from my projects
and release a CD. One of the main reasons is that it would completely
contradict what's going on there. One of the really interesting things about
the PANSE music is that it's endless and how do you put an endless
composition on CD? Another reason is that I don't feel that it's "my" music
to do with as I choose. Most of the different modules available give very
distinctive sounds. If I open the PANSE audio stream, I can quite often tell
which module the last user was using just by the style of the music.
Therefore, I have to give compositional credit to the creators of those
modules. But of course they can't claim complete ownership because it's my
system. On top of all that, there are the users. Surely they have
contributed in a big way, so they must own part of it as well. But the most
interesting thing about this type of work, and this is both a "pro" and a
"con", is that you never really know what's going to happen and the more you
open up an interactive project, the more control you give to the public, the
more chaotic it's likely to get. Of course the downside is that the system
has to be extremely robust. If someone does something that you haven't
anticipated, it could crash the whole thing. The upside however, is that it
can introduce you to directions that the work could take, that you would
never have thought of yourself. When I first listened to PANSE while viewing
Joachim Lapotre's modules, I couldn't believe that I was actually listening
to PANSE. Even though I created the audio engine, I had no idea that it
could sound like that. So it becomes sort of a creative breeding ground for
new ideas.
AD: What would you say to a master musician or composer
who finds fault with things like anonymous, spontaneous
collaboration or single purpose instruments played with a
mouse? Are you rocking the boat of musical tradition?
PT: I have discussed my work with a "master musician" (Icelandic composer Atli
Ingolfsson http://www.atli-ingolfsson.com) but he doesn't find fault with
things like anonymous, spontaneous collaboration, etc. But he's a very
serious, experimental composer who's dealing with a lot of theoretical
aspects of music. I know very little about music theory and that's why I
quit trying to make my own music. What I claim to be dealing with in my work
has to do with visual art theory and history. I'm trying to explore the
relationship between this new medium and more conventional art practices.
The emergence of abstract art had a lot to do with music and that's why I
combine the two. Music, to me, is inherently abstract and that's a much
easier concept to grasp than anything visual being abstract. We're used to
hearing sounds and music that don't necessarily relate to an object. But
when we see something, even a shape that's unfamiliar to us, we tend to say
something like, "It looks sort of like a house." The way kids do when they
look for shapes in the clouds. Wassily Kandinski claimed that he could
"hear" his paintings however I doubt that everyone can "hear" the same
things in his paintings (I can't hear anything in his paintings). PANSE
brings this more down to earth. You can truly hear the "paintings" and
everyone hears and sees the same thing. You don't have to say, "It almost
resembles a horse sunbathing in front of a toll-booth." You can look and
say, "It sounds like this." turn up the volume and everyone says, "Aha, I
see." I'm not interested in "rocking the boat of musical tradition". I'm not
even interested in "rocking the boat of visual art tradition". I'm somewhat
annoyed by the fact that people seem to think that because we have a new
medium at our disposal, we need to make new art. I'm more interested in
finding out what happens if we try to make old art with the new medium.
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