Jim Pallas

1945

A native Detroiter, I awoke to the possibilities while attending a state university in Detroit. Before I graduated in 1965 with a M.F.A., I was blessed with a day job to which I gratefully clung for thirty-eight years, teaching the boomers and their kids at a local community college.

I began creating responsive, content laden kinetic sculpture in the 1960's.
It was in 1965, in the basement of the physics department at the University of Michigan, - after hours - that I first laid eyes on a computer and had my mind boggled by its reality. A young technician was playing a very early computer game called "SPACEWAR!" with a guy online in Berkeley. Each controlled a little triangular space craft that fired "photon torpedoes" into the gravitational tug of a spinning asterisk "sun."
 

Jim and Janet Laur,
who became his wife 1962. 

The web is a realization of the some of the potential that was present in the amalgam of those cross-country phone lines, the glowing blue phosphor tube and that kid in Ann Arbor matching skill with the ace in Berkeley.
In the 70's, I discovered the joy of TTL logic devices and the graphic expression of printed circuit boards. My first choice for a programming language became solder.
Art should be free.   I did a telephone project in 1974 where anyone could call an announcing machine and get a "phonevent". I then solicited tapes from artists and changed them every two weeks. No charge. Nobody made any money. Nobody was supposed to make any money. We did it to ask the question " Can the telephone" be art?'. 10,000 calls in a two week period was common. It was popular enough that, once, the volume of calls shut down three exchanges. The telephone company was not impressed.

Generally, my artworks are interactive performing sculptures that depend on a combination of electronic logic and environmental stimuli to produce behaviors of movement, sound, light, or other phenomena. They often represent creatures or personages. I've been called a surrealist.
 

1972	1998

More self portraits

 

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