COMBINING THE TECHNICAL WITH THE SPIRITUAL
by Tom Bloomer

" The question is loaded - talking about art and technology. You're talking about two different things. Art is a very spiritual, personal kind of activity, while technology is a concern with how to get things done well and efficiently.  The two belong together.  I mean, artists have always been interested in technology.  Even cave paintings - the guy was  thinking about what earth gave him the darkest red. That's art and technology right there."   J. Pallas
 

Energy is a good word to use in describing Jim Pallas. It works on all kinds of levels. He approaches his job as a Fine Arts faculty member at Macomb County Community College with a large degree of energy, both in the classroom and around campus, where he has initiated schemes like a computer graphics workshop and student murals, as well as other innovative projects. Energy also works on a physical level, as anyone who has been witness to his occasional woodland hikes can attest. And energy is what his work is about, both technically and spiritually. His works, which are, for the most part, conceptual networks of welded rod, Plexiglas and logic circuitry, depend on electronic energy, as well as environmental stimulus, to make them function. And they put out a kind of mystic energy that, at once, seems to be the synthesis of great technological know-how, a bizarre but adept sense of aesthetics, and perhaps a bit of good old wholesome Zen Lunacy, the important ingredient in Pallas' make-up - the ingredient that inspires activities like the founding of his "conceptual organization" Detroit Art Works, the ingredient that led him to submit the following poem as a biography to the Michigan Sculpture '77 catalogue:

The Blue Wazoo
The bead of consciousness suspends
Continuity marking,
Spaced stimuli.
Buddah-nature wavers twitch.
The dream bag fills.
Possibility tendrils
and necessity rings
Pop up.
Bead descends.

"I try to keep my mind off what I am doing; it makes the work more revelationary. David Barr says art works are like dinosaur shit; if you study it carefully you can get some notion of the nature of the beast that produced it and what was nurturing him at the time." J. Pallas

This month (February 14-March 11, 1978) the Detroit Institute of Arts will be presenting the work of Jim Pallas in another of their series of "Works in Progress" shows. This show will represent much of his work over the last three years. High-lighting the exhibit will be a major five-piece work that, he relates, "engaged my major energies for the past two years." The Ego Machine is a complex work in technology, structure and concept. It is representative of most every facet of its maker's major concerns, both in terms of medium and message, Pallas, in a recently published 'Physical Description of the Ego Machine', describes it as "an environment-sensing, wholly programmable group of five multicolored sculptures capable of responding to signals generated by externally controlled logic structures and memories. The response mechanisms include three sound synthesizers, each capable of a wide variety of sounds, a one hundred and forty-four light matrix, and various behaviors of related sculptures." This piece marks Pallas' first attempt at electronically producing sound in a major work, and is also his first "owner- operated" piece. The interconnections of circuitry are made through the use of patch chords "much like a Moog synthesizer or an old fashioned telephone switchboard," allowing the operator to experiment with an "astronomically large number of possibilities."

The major component, The Ego Hisself, he describes as being the "brains of the piece." It contains all of the logic circuits, as well as sound producing circuits, on ". . .one sort of core thing." It also contains the 144 light emitting diode matrix that can be programmed to do any number of patterns. It is a blue acrylic-coated steel shell with red and green plastic shapes embedded in its surface, and measures six and one half by seven feet. It is meant to hang on a wall, and projects outward about eighteen inches. Hanging from this are hundreds of blue rubber patch chords.

Feeding data to The Ego, via underground cable, is an outside wind mobile which Pallas calls the "Wind Attendant."  It's made of acrylic-coated bronze and aluminum, and stands approximately six and a half feet high by four feet wide. It's two propellers generate data based on present wind velocity, and it has an 'eye' (photocell) which sends data concerning light level. Pallas has been using environmental stimuli in his pieces for quite a while. He comments ". . if you build a system of behavior and that's essentially what I'm doing and if you want it to function as a work of art from an aesthetic point of view, the thing has to be interesting on a lot of different levels. It has to be interesting physically, optically, aurally, or in whatever sort of sense data that the thing is giving off. And it occurred to me, when I started making these works, that if environmental factors affected the behavior of the piece, with the consideration that the environment is always changing - or, at least, going through large cycles of change - that the piece would, as it changed with the environment, be interesting. So I chose this type of stimulus-response system, as opposed to a closed system, such as a clock, where it's lust responding to its own kind of motivations".

The three other pieces within the Ego Machine - the Old Bag (formerly 'The Holy Ghost'), the Baby (named by his son and daughter) and The Moon and Cloud - are totally concerned with output behavior, being fully controlled by The Ego and Wind Attendant
.
The Old Bag is a hanging polyethylene bag, bound with white nylon chord. It stands seven and a half feet high and three feet wide, and projects one foot from the wall it's mounted on. In describing it, Pal las commented:
"It inflates and deflates, in a very basic kind of respiration, very biological. It contains a feather flop mechanism . . . that is, a feather that builds to a certain point in its cycle, governed by a timer motor, then dramatically flops. That's another kind of cycle that the Old Bag involves itself with. The two cycles together make it magical, strange . . . like a fetish kind of piece."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On The Moon and Cloud piece, he says: "The Moon and Cloud is . . . to me, I have associations of when people speak in comic books. They have that balloon that comes out of their mouths . . . and that's why it's that shape. It's kind of a thought in the Ego's mind. It's very removed, detached, aloof." The piece is a dark blue panel, 15 by 21 inches in size, that can be illuminated from within, causing it to turn a radiant sky blue. Embedded in this panel is a white moon and a 'migrating cloud,' which occasionally obscures it. The moon is a symbol that has continued to interest Pallas for years" ... since student days . . . actually, since they started shooting rockets at it. That's when I got the idea to use it as a symbol of . . . something unattainable. They can put a rocket on it, and some guy can come out and dump 200 pounds of scientific equipment and other shit on it, and it's still unattainable. The cloud is like a sign of fertility, something that can obscure that unattainable thing."
Perhaps the most interesting of the Ego Machine pieces is the Baby. It is interesting because it extends beyond the usual visual out put of the piece, making drawings that are then sold, by Pallas, thus plugging it into the art market. Pallas comments on it: "I wanted to make a piece that was sort of the opposite of the Moon and Cloud, a piece that would maybe crawl around in the mud, and I was thinking of actually making a sandbox for it, and it would just crawl around and make patterns. At one point it was fur covered, and you could pick It up and it would make noises. You could hold it in your lap, like something living. But that was just too theatrical. I didn't like it. It had a claw, and it was really kind of an ugly little creature. So I changed it and it became known as Baby. It still crawls, but I have it standing on three sets of pen holders. It makes drawings. So then I realized that the whole thing was like the artist, in that it takes all of this environmental stimulus, puts it through this insane logic, and produces works. So I worked on that end of it." In working on the Baby, Pallas found that, as it crawled along, drawing, it would occasionally flip over onto its back, waving its 'feet' in the air. Realizing this as an activity inherent in the art making process - the stoppage of the creative output phase to allow for collection and synthesis of information, he created three clouds, white on one side, mirrored on the other, to replace the pen holders.
Of the drawings, Pallas says; "I sold the first one for a dollar, the second for two, and each subsequent one for a dollar more than the last. It's an art market game."

The Ego Machine, along with other recent pieces, have propelled Jim Pallas to a new level of recognition, the products of this being both the D.l.A. show and a recently successful New York trip, during which he secured a one man show at the Allan Stone Gallery, in October of this year. He will also be the subject of a cover story in Creative Computing (Jan.-Feb. issue).
"The entire truth about anything is almost impossible to tell within practical limits. No desert is absolutely dry, no liquid absolutely wet, plane completely flat, no ball-bearing  truly  round."  A  quotation  from                                        Malvino's  text ELECTRONIC PRINCIPLES, which is, like Pallas, not a bad source of metaphysical information. •
 
 

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