Disquiet

The Thicket app can be understood as many things. An interactive audio-visual delicacy programmed by Morgan Packard (the audio half) and Joshue Ott (the visual half), it is composition and instrument, toy and tool, video art and record album. It runs on the iOS suite of gadgets — the iPad, the iPhone, and the iPod Touch — and turns each of their respective screens into a rarefied sonic playground, one with its own rules and its own rewards.

Thicket presents itself, initially, as a black screen covered with what seem like a nanotech vision of pickup sticks. These myriad razor-thin white lines glisten and bounce around the screen to an elegant score that seems halfway between the gauzy blankness of ambient and the automaton funk of techno. Had Jackson Pollock lived long enough to be a developer on the Atari arcade classic Tempest, it might have looked like this.

Digits, All: Two hands and up to ten fingers can be used to manipulate the Thicket app on the iPad (shown here), the iPhone, and the iPod Touch.

But to touch the screen is to break the score’s fourth wall — to touch the screen is to alter the sound, and the visuals along with it. With each additional finger, the pace of the piece is altered — dragging fingers across the surface brings new patterns. Hold them long enough in the first version of Thicket, and a whole new mixture of sound and image comes into view.

While debugging the second edition of Thicket, version 2.0, which was released today (November 8, 2010), Packard participated in an extended conversation about what Thicket is and what it isn’t: “I don’t want to cross over from creating an interactive art piece which people can explore,” he says, “to creating a completely open-ended tool.”

Perhaps what Thicket is is a peek into a possible future for music, and for video — a future in which a release isn’t a static recording but a malleable one, designed to be played with, prodded, explored. Thicket’s pleasures are real and formidable, but they are also anticipatory, hinting at cultural norms yet to be fully imagined, let alone codified. There’s always a lot of talk in the world of interactive multimedia of 19th-century opera legend Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work that combines all art forms. Thicket is such a work, yet one that never loses sight of its own economy, its own modesty.

Ott, who studied computer graphics, lives in Brooklyn. Packard, who studied anthropology in college and spent some years in the jazz department at the New England Conservatory in Boston, lived in Brooklyn for a decade, but these days makes his home in Denver. Like a lot of people who program, they got their primary education by working. Says Packard, an accomplished electronic musician with several albums to his credit, “I think both of us really cut our teeth coding in the Internet industry.”

Over the course of the interview, Packard talks about how composing music for interactive applications differs from traditional composition (“The idea of retro-fitting a studio production for interactivity gives me shivers”), explains why the second version of Thicket is purposefully less puzzling than its predecessor, and provides a peek inside the Thicket code.

Marc Weidenbaum: The Thicket app — I’m still sorting out whether to call it a “piece” or a “song,” or what exactly to call it — seems to have a few modes, primarily the white-lined one and then the blue-lined one. I’m trying to get a sense of whether I think of the blue-lined part as a “chorus,” versus the white-line “verse,” or a “bridge.” Do these comparisons sit with you?

Morgan Packard: Honestly, I’ve never really identified strongly with any verse-chorus type of music. My first, intense love was jazz, which tends to have all different sorts of structures, and then I went straight in to focusing on underground dance music, which tends to be steady state music, about the groove, the moment, rather than larger structures like verse and chorus. But the analogy does fit. Especially with the new version of Thicket [version 2], which has more modes and an easier way to transition between them; I find myself alternating back and forth in a way that feels like different sections of the same musical piece.

Weidenbaum: Regarding the new version of Thicket, what did you learn from the first version that led you to update it as you did?

Packard: Some of the changes in the new version are in response to problems we identified, and some of them are just us wanting to add more stuff, make it a fuller, deeper experience. The biggest difference is in the mode system. In the first version of Thicket, there were three distinct modes, which you entered based on a fairly obscure calculation based around how active your fingers were. This worked OK, but was confusing to people, and sometimes felt arbitrary. You’d be having fun in one mode, and all of a sudden, you’re thrown into a different visual and sound world. I sometimes found it annoying, actually. The new version has none of those surprise mode changes. You change modes by simply rotating the device. It’s much nicer now, being able to control how the modes change.

Continue reading “Being Decimal: The Anticipatory Pleasures of the Thicket App”