Tim Thompson

 First Time Art Party Participant

Space Palette (click on image for video)

Artist’s Website

nosuch.com/tjt

About Space Palette

Space Palette (2014) is a musical and graphical instrument controlled by gesture. Gently move your hands through the holes in the palette to play musical notes and paint colorful visuals. Play up to four different instruments at the same time by reaching into the large palette holes, which function as three-dimensional control surfaces. Select from twelve different sets of sounds and graphics by using the small holes, which function as buttons. The Space Palette responds to three dimensions of expressive control: the depth of your hands controls the size of the graphics and the character of the sounds; the horizontal position of your hands controls the pitch of the notes; and the vertical position of your hands controls their speed.

About the Artist

I’m a software engineer, musician, and installation artist. I worked at Bell Labs and AT&T for 20 years in New Jersey, and for Network Appliance in Silicon Valley for 9 years. I’m interested in programming languages, algorithmic composition, networked collaboration, atypical controllers, event-driven graphics generation, and realtime video processing. I’ve been inspired in recent years by something described in this quote by Larnie Fox:

“There is a yet unnamed art movement that may prove to be of some significance, and Burning Man is close to its center. It often manifests itself as circus, ritual, and spectacle. It is a movement away from a dialogue between an individual artist and a sophisticated audience, and towards collaboration amongst a big, wild, free and diverse community. It is a movement away from galleries, schools and other institutions and towards an art produced in and for casual groups of participants, more akin to clans and tribes, based on aesthetic affinities and bonds of friendship. It is a movement away from static gallery art and formal theater and towards site-specific, time-specific installation and performance. It is a rejection of spoon-fed corporate culture and an affirmation of the homemade, the idiosyncratic, the personal. It is profoundly democratic. It is radically inclusive, it is a difficult challenge, and it is beckoning.”