Pall Thayer at Pace Digital Gallery


"wassup, tYgEr_lil_E?"
Pall Thayer, solo exhibition at Pace Digital Gallery
Nov 15 - Dec 8, 2006

Nov 15: discussion with the artist and reception 2-4pm
Pace University
2nd floor, 163 William Street (between Beekman and Ann Streets)
New York, NY


"Wassup, tYgEr_lil_E?" is an examination of the impact of digital media on abstract art. The title references Woody Allen's film, "What's up, Tiger Lily?" (1966) from which it borrows a simple idea: dubbing a foreign movie's dialogue with completely unrelated text, in an attempt to alter the story. "Wassup, tYgEr_lil_E?" captures images from live video feeds and provides on-screen subtitles with text captured from live Internet chat sessions. Thayer made no attempt to match images to text. Computers have no conscious understanding of the subject material they are being made to appropriate. Therefore the result, being generated by automated computer processes, becomes an abstraction.

Pall Thayer (1968) is an Icelandic artist working with computers and the Internet. He graduated from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1999 with a background in mixed-media. His work has been exhibited widely at festivals and group shows such as Nordic Interactive in Copenhagen, Transmediale in Berlin, The Boston CyberArts Festival, Hipersonica/File in Sao Paulo and PixxelPoint in Slovenia. In 2004 he organized the Trans-Cultural Mapping: Iceland Inside and Out workshop in locative media for Lorna, The Icelandic Organization for Electronic Arts, of which he is an active member. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

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