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'The opposition between hearing and staring finds its strange union with the diamond stylus, a diamond above all that writes out sound as well as reflects light.'-- Duncan Smith, The Age of Oil
'Paul DeMarinis, a pioneer of early electronic, interactive art, teaches in Stanford’s art department. He recently received the prestigious Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for his piece The Messenger. An elaborate visualization of incoming e-mail, The Messenger is based on 18th century physician Francesc Silva’s telegraph system in which 26 servants, each assigned a letter of the alphabet, would reconstruct messages from afar by announcing their letter when they received an electric shock.
'DeMarinis’s art studio sits on the western edge of Stanford’s campus, where the trees aren’t manicured. Just up the road, Eadweard Muybridge created one of the first motion-picture capture systems at the turn of the 20th century while helping Leland Stanford settle a bet on whether horses, when galloping, ever lift all four hooves simultaneously (they do).
'Following the example Muybridge set a century ago, DeMarinis constructs machines that reveal normally unseen physical forces at play. In his pieces, flames become loudspeakers resonating with the voices of dictators (Firebirds, 2004); gum wrappers act as capacitors for radio tuners (Four Foxhole Radios, 2000); and music is encoded into streams of water, playing when the water hits an umbrella (RainDance/Music Acuatica, 1998). Calling a flame a loudspeaker isn’t to speak metaphorically, by the way. The flames really do emit sound, achieved via jets of flaming propane that are electromagnetically modulated by relative fluctuations between charged
diodes.
'So much for the magic act; how did he make the leap from flame to sound in the first place? “In the case of Firebirds...it was really a happenstance occurrence. I was sitting around [a fire with friends] in 1975...and there was a pause in the conversation and we heard, coming out of a jet of gas in the log, the end of a pop song and the beginning of an announcer’s voice. It was AM radio coming out of this little gas jet. It was just one of the strangest things. We looked at each other...and we said, ‘wow, that’s a treasure,’” he recalls, laughing.
'One of the first artists to incorporate computers into his works, he is keen also to exhume abandoned technologies of the past. DeMarinis’s clever reinterpretation of lost technologies adds an air of magic to physical phenomena.
'“There’s the famous dictum of Arthur C. Clarke that if we encountered a civilization only moderately advanced beyond our own technologically, that everything they did would seem like magic .... I think you can work that in reverse too; if you encounter one of these technologies that’s old by only a few decades, people often perceive those things as magical: ‘How can sound come out of a fire?’ Because it’s never been marketed.”'-- Ambidextrous Magazine
_____
5 works
______
Dust (2009)
'Images of the faces of missing children are projected piecemeal onto a surface covered with phosphorescent pigment powder. The image accumulates and the trace of faces is left behind as a green glow. Low frequency sounds vibrate the powder, transforming the image into abstract patterns of sound waves.
'Everybody collects something. In 1987 I started collecting missing children flyers.
'I don’t know whether it is just a local phenomenon, but in San Francisco there are mail advertisements featuring local automobile brake and clutch repair joints on one side, and on the other, images, usually a pair of images, of a child who has gone missing. The image on the left is a picture of the child at the time of disappearance, the image on the right is either an age-progression by an artist of what the child might look like now (often decades later) or a picture of the abductor, most frequently one of the child’s parents. Sometimes there is no picture on the right — probably the most worrisome case.
'These cards are usually the first item of junk mail to throw out, but it was not contrariness that made me start collecting them. Rather, a project beckoned: I was immediately struck by the likeness between the two images — the child and the age-progressed child, or the child and the parent. The project would have been kinetic, media-archaeological, probably inspired by Christian Boltanski’s work from that period. Suffice it to say, some inner editor nixed the realization of that one. But I continue, to this day, to collect these most worthless items of junk mail, even as my own horizon of what constitutes surplus information has expanded.
'Dust presents a fragment of this collection of likeness-pairs, scanned sequentially into the light-memory of phosphorescent powder. After a few minutes of exposure to the projected image, the powder retains a faint green image of the two faces on its surface, something akin to the »latent image« of photographic film or the veil of memory. Unlike photographic film, though, the image starts to distort. Propelled by low frequency sound vibrations, the powder starts to flow and dance, first distorting the faces and erasing their likeness, then distorting them into patterns* of abstract light in motion, with form and beauty all its own.
'*These abstract patterns are known as »Chladni« patterns after the late 18th c. German physicist of that name. They were the first observed and studied images of sound, and their discovery attracted much attention, promising insight into the nature of vibration. Napoleon, the emperor of France, offered a prize to anyone who could rigorously explain the relationship between the visual patterns and the sound. The prize was claimed in the end, by the mathematician Sophie Germain, who determined that the patterns are in fact a consequence of the shape and material of the vibrating surface, rather than the frequency or spectral characteristics of the sound.'-- Paul DeMarinis
_________
RainDance (2010)
'In 1837 the physicist Félix Savart observed that sound vibrations can affect the visual appearance of a jet of water. Subsequent studies determined that the patterns of fluctuations caused by the sound actually reproduce certain aspects of the sound if they fall on a drum.
'RainDance builds on this phenomenon of physics to create an interactive and literally immersive sound environment where people can explore “musical” streams of water with umbrellas.
'Water is passed through specially designed “modulation nozzles” that impose the vibrations of audio frequencies onto the stream of droplets. For example, 440 vibrations per second results in a stream of 440 water droplets emitted from the nozzle per second. When these droplets fall on a resonant surface such as an umbrella, the tone of A above middle C is reproduced.
'In this way various familiar melodies can be reproduced. With different streams, multiple-part harmonies or mixtures of disparate materials can be generated.'-- Soundart.zkm.de
_________
pneuma (2010)
'Paul DeMarinis'pneuma featured speakers whose cones would rise and fall in sync while playing the sound of an individual (different for each speaker) sleeping and dust would project images onto phosphorescent powder (in a darkened room) that would then remain when the light source was removed...then subjected to low frequency tones causing them to distort, eventually becoming changed like a shaken etch-a-sketch, but actually forming patterns of "abstract light in motion"...a thoughtful meditation on impermanence, even in a way, mortality.'-- Jeff Kaiser
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___________
The Messenger (1998)
'In The Messenger, email messages received over the internet are displayed letter by letter on three alphabetic telegraph receivers: a large array of 26 talking washbasins, each intoning a letter of the alphabet in Spanish; a chorus line of 26 dancing skeletons and a series of 26 electrolytic jars with metal electrodes in the form of the letters A to Z that oscillate and bubble when electricity is passed through them.'-- turbulence.org
'The Messenger is an internet-driven installation based on early proposals for the electrical telegraph, in particular those made by the Catalan scientist Francisco Salvo. As in many of my works I examine the metaphors encoded within technology, especially lost or orphaned technologies and try to trace their origins, speculating on the way that mechanisms are the repositories of larger unspoken conceptions and dreams. In The Messenger I take the telegraph as a point of departure from which to examine the relationship between electricity and democracy, and how electrical telecommunication technologies have participated in our solidarity and in our isolation, in our equality and our oppression, in the richness of our experience and the uncertainty of our lives.'-- Paul DeMarinis
______________
The Edison Effect
'A series of interactive sculptures that play ancient phonograph records with laser beams. The reflections of light from the walls of the groove carry the audio information to photoelectric devices where it is translated first into an electrical signal, then into sound by a loudspeaker. The resultant sounds range from recognizable to distorted, something like a distant shortwave radio or a haunting bit of a melody just barely remembered. The arrangment of optics, motors and light allow random access to the grooves of the records, permitting distortion, dis-arrangement and de-composition of the musical material.
'Each Edison Effect player is a meditation on some aspect of the relations among music, memory and the passage of time. Our sense of time, memory, and belonging have all been changed by the exact repetition implicit in mechanical recording. The needle in the groove, no less than the needle in the vein, is one symbolic emblem on our quixotic quest for the perfect moment of fulfillment. Re-played here, without needles, the record becomes what it really is: a holographic object, a simultaneous smorgasbord to be consumed in the order and taste we see fit. The raw and raucous noises of the record surface commingle with the sounds inscribed in the groove, creating a havoc of misinterpreted intentions and benign accidents.
'The phonograph and the photograph have a coeval history of influence and development. The Edison Effect players demonstrate the photographic nature of acoustic recordings. These pinhole ( or needlepoint ? ) pictures of sounds long vanished project the shadows of sounds. Holograms, gamma rays, goldfish and cunieform serve to emphasize the parallel narrative of the mechanization of image and sonic inscription.'-- Paul DeMarinis
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Video: 'The Edison Effect'
________________
The Edison Effect: Individual works
____________
'Al & Mary Do the Waltz'
'A turn-of-the-century Edison wax cylinder of Strauss'"Blue Danube Waltz" is turned on a paint roller rotated by a motor and rubber band. A laser beam is focused on the groove of the cylinder and its reflections are translated into sound. The laser beam passes through a bowl of goldfish who occasionally interrupt the beam to produce uncomposed musical pauses.'-- PDM
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____________
'Dinner at Ernies'
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____________
'Ich auch Berlin(er)'
'A tribute to the Berlin(er) brothers, Emil, Irving, and John Fitzgerald. A gelatin dichromate hologram of a 78 rpm record of the "Beer Barrel Polka" is rotated on a transparent turntable and played by a green laser. Once I realized that only light reflections were needed to make the recorded grooves audible, it became apparent that a hologram (the memory of light reflecting from a surface) would suffice to play music. Here, sans needle, sans groove, the band plays on.'-- PDM
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_____________
'Lecture of Comrade Stalin'
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_____________
'Fragments from Jericho'
'An authentic recreation of what is probably the world's most ancient audio recording. A clay cylinder inscribed (by intention or accident?) with voices from the past. By gently turning a large black knob, you can direct the laser beam across the surface of the turning clay vessel to eavesdrop on vibrations from another age.'-- PDM
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______________
'Fireflies Alight on the Abacus of Al-Farabi'
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_____________
'Un-raveled Melody'
'Mechanical recording exerted its effects upon music composition by coercing preexisting rondo forms into ever tighter spirals. A hologram of Ravel's ""Bolero" cycles forever, as the laser beam weaves its path along the dance floor.'-- PDM
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_____________
'Murder by Television'
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_____________
'Rhondo in Blew a la Cold Turkey'
'A 78 of "Rhapsody in Blue" is erratically scanned by a laser beam emitting from a hypodermic syringe. We may contemplate the addictive act of record listening as Oscar Levant plays himself playing Gershwin in another tired remake of "An American [Junkie] in Paris".'-- PDM
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____
Lecture
Essay in lieu of a Sonata
Paul DeMarinis
My title "The Edison Effect" has multiple references. It refers first to the profound and irreversible effect the invention of sound recording has had upon music, the soundscape, upon the time and place of our memory and sense of belonging. It should also call to mind Thomas Alva Edison's illicit claim to the invention of the light bulb, and his general propensity for copying and appropriation as an emblem of the inherently uncertain authorship of all recorded works. Finally, it invokes a metaphorical allusion to the physical phenomenon known as the "Edison Effect" wherein atoms from a glowing filament are deposited on the inner surface of light bulbs causing them to darken. It was this phenomenon of thermionic emission that, when understood, made possible the invention of the "audion" or vacuum tube. This, in turn, led to the development of sound amplification as well as radio, television and the earliest digital computers. The metaphorical image of the darkening of the light is an ancient one, recurring in the I-Ching, in Mazdaism, and in Shakespeare's oxymoronic "when night's candles have burnt out". Enantiodromic reversal at the atomic level can be used to symbolize opposing primal forces and may serve to mythicize otherwise commonplace occurrences.
Edison's name and face are synonymous with invention, brilliance and technological innovation. As the modern Prometheus, he lured millions toward the light. The light bulb, commonly believed to be his consummate invention, still stands as an iconic exclamation of ideas, innovation - the stroke of genius.1 The discovery of a potentially fatal flaw inherent in the invention - that the light-producing bulbs would themselves darken, causing them to cast shadows rather than light - was perceived by Edison to be a potential bug, a stain upon his brilliant reputation. To compound the paradox with irony, this is the only bona fide scientific phenomenon which bears the inventor's name. Whereas other nineteenth century colossi, such as Tesla, Ampere or Volta had basic units of measure or even third world nations named after them, Edison, universally resented by the scientific community and deemed by them a charlatan and promoter, was grudgingly awarded only this obscure and obscuring "effect" to immortalize his name.
It is often the case that a new medium's first major flaw or contradiction is destined to become its dominant metaphor. The disembodying upside-downness of Della Porta's camera obscura, the shadows created by light falling on Niepce's photographic emulsion producing a "negative" image, the montage necessitated by the frailty and shortness of early celluloid film - these have become the mechanophors which convey the richness and complexity of our experience. No less with the whole of Edison's oeuvre. Like the lightbulb, the phonograph casts its own unearthly shadows upon listening, upon our memory and our sense of time. It is the false and deceptive quality of the voice which emanates from the phonograph or gramophone, compounded by the mindless soliloquy of the of the broken record, which lends its root to our word "phony". The exact repetition of this falsehood ingrains itself in our memories, creating a sequence of recognition, anticipation and fulfillment which is in itself addictive and predictive. Prior to the invention of mechanical recording, references to the now commonplace phenomenon of a tune-running-thru-the-head appear absent from literature.
A dream of early phonographers was to read with their eyes the wiggly line inscribed by the needle as a lasting trace upon the wax - allowing the illiterate to write, the uncouth to compose, even the spirits of the dead to speak. Such efforts soon proved futile.4 The scopic impulse relentlessly afoot in western civilization appears to have been delayed by almost an epoch. If the nineteenth century had invoked sight alone to comprehend the infinity of space, ( superseding the eighteenth century's insistence that space is known by the sense of touch,) a more ancient tactile paradigm persisted in matters of memory, perhaps due to their traditional codings in the form of renaissance spatial-mnemonic systems. Until very recently - the 1980's, - the memorative act of audition still consisted of dragging a diamond stylus, fingernail-like, across a vinyl blackboard. As the needle played, it eroded the memory it touched. Ever so slightly, as the needle touched, the sounds present in the room in which it played were minutely engraved and added to the record.
Edison's earliest efforts were feeble impressions on tinfoil, easily erased by the act of playing them. Indeed, the first recording was so frail it only could reproduce once and then die. Later efforts in wax proved durable enough to be played dozens of times before the effects of the mechanism combined with the sounds in the environment would modify and erase them forever. And still each record was a unique object. The Edison laboratory's earliest cylinders of mass production were created by capturing the sound of an orchestra on twenty or more phonographs - the orchestra's output of a two minute waltz might thus amount to many hundred cylinders per day 5 . By the turn of the century, with the advent of electroplating and gold-molding, many thousands of records could be manufactured, sold, played, enjoyed and worn out before the orchestra would need to reconvene and intone the waltz anew. The escalation of this economic exercise culminates in the digital compact disc - a consumer item whose durability is adamantine and whose relation to the original soundwaves - thus its use-value - is determined wholly by the ruling taste. The laser touches but fleetingly upon the groove, the impact of its photons abrading no material whatsoever. The rupture is complete. The emancipation of memory from touch has been fulfilled. The age of the palimpsest is over.
_________
Further
Paul DeMarinis Webpage
CD: 'The Edison Effect: A Listener's Companion'
Paul DeMarinis @ Wikipedia
Video: Paul DeMarinis Profile @ Spark
Paul DeMarinis Artist Statement
Book: 'Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise'
----
*
p.s. Hey. In a first for the blog, silent reader KD has gone back five years and taken the basics of an old post I made then enlarged, expanded, and reinvented it into a guest-post to call his own. Cool and interesting modus operandi for me, and I'm happy to see DeMarinis's work spotlit in a larger way here. I think that's all you need to know, so go forth or, rather, back up a ways and check everything out. Thank you a lot, KD! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. I don't have any links to the Rampling/ Sarkozy thing on hand, but, during the election, she was well known here as one of the "famous French" who were publicly and passionately supporting him along with people like Depardieu, Johnny Hallyday, and others. I don't think IC-B's work is camp at all. I think that's an imposition. It's true that she's beloved among a lot of literary types who happen to be gay, and a number of that type whom I know, but they never speak of her work as campy. Sublime, yes. I don't know of Zemmour or if she's dating him. I can try to ask around. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark! Yeah, it's hard for me to read more than, say, a dozen pages of ICB's prose before I'm overloaded and too swoony to continue. That density and richness, and how that heavily organizes how one reads her novels, is one of things that make me so in awe of her. How are you man? ** Joshua nilles, Hi. Beach Sloth is pretty much the only reviewer of a bunch of extremely good newer writers, which is very strange. Some day his pioneering, adventurous efforts will be recognized outside the scene, I'm sure. Cool, yeah, the price of being vegetarian is there. But then there are a lot of cuisines friendly to vegetarians that can be not that pricey at decent quality like Italian, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Thai, etc., etc. But, yeah, there's that. I just balance out buying my veggie stuff at health food stores by cutting back a bit on the buying of books, music, clothes, etc., I guess. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, She is utterly unique, and I highly recommend trying her work because there is nothing else like it. You'll know pretty quickly whether her prose is crush worthy or not. I know all about the lengthy time involved in rendering, for sure. Awesome! Tick, tick, ... ** Keaton, Everyone, celebrate Xmas two days early by reading what looks for all the world to be a Xmas story unlike any other in the most positive respect by, yes, Keaton (!), and, yes, right here (!)'. It's beautifully titled 'Lepreclaus', a title of which I personally am extremely envious. Hi. Oh, man, 'Adieu au Langage' was the best thing I saw, read, listened to, ate, etc. this year, I think. Super inspiring. My head has been swarming with things I want to try in my writing ever since. I haven't read Jane Austen since my brief year at university. And Henry James, yeah, good stuff, but not my thing. It is almost Xmas. It's freaky. I have to go look at all the Paris Xmas makeover stuff really fast. Bon holidays to you! ** Steevee, Hi. Well, I know about that TLC Mormon show because about a third of the people in FB feed posted about it two days ago, yeah. If I were Stateside and sans something else to do, I would watch at least 15 minutes of it, I guess, just to know. You gonna try it? ** Misanthrope, Cool, she rules. I got hacked or something, I forget, a few years ago and devised the most complicated password humanly possible for my mail, blog, etc., and I've been safe ever since, but it's too complicated a password to be memorize-able, at least by me, so it gets me into all kinds of trouble when I forget to bring a slip of paper scribbled with the password wherever I go. There must be a happy medium. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. Really, you want all those eyes? Why? Do you mind explaining why? When I imagine that, my whole body starts itching and my pores feel like they're going to vomit. Obviously, I'm thinking way too practically about the question. I know of 'The Innocents', but, weirdly, I don't think I've ever seen it. Huh. Yeah, I really should. Might make a nice Xmas movie. Oh, your question today is extremely easy. 'Father Sgt. Christmas Card' by Guided by Voices. One of very favorite songs in any season. What's your choice? ** Rewritedept, Hi. Ha ha, IC-B is so incredibly not FH-B, ha ha. It's like Antarctica versus Hawaii or something. Sounds like avoiding your brother is a smart move. I have one brother whom I hope to avoid for the rest of his or my life. Finches do seem like they would be rad. I'm getting as much non-film work done as I can, but there's film work to do that isn't editing, so my headway is not a headwind. On Xmas day, me? Probably squat. Nobody's around. Eat a Buche, go enjoy the extreme quiet of Paris on that day, I don't know. Xmas over here is usually just like a post-nuclear Sunday or something. Which is fine. Good day to you, man. ** Okay. If you will, investigate what Paul DeMarinis does under the the guidance of KD because both aspects are very cool. See you tomorrow.
'The opposition between hearing and staring finds its strange union with the diamond stylus, a diamond above all that writes out sound as well as reflects light.'-- Duncan Smith, The Age of Oil
'Paul DeMarinis, a pioneer of early electronic, interactive art, teaches in Stanford’s art department. He recently received the prestigious Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for his piece The Messenger. An elaborate visualization of incoming e-mail, The Messenger is based on 18th century physician Francesc Silva’s telegraph system in which 26 servants, each assigned a letter of the alphabet, would reconstruct messages from afar by announcing their letter when they received an electric shock.
'DeMarinis’s art studio sits on the western edge of Stanford’s campus, where the trees aren’t manicured. Just up the road, Eadweard Muybridge created one of the first motion-picture capture systems at the turn of the 20th century while helping Leland Stanford settle a bet on whether horses, when galloping, ever lift all four hooves simultaneously (they do).
'Following the example Muybridge set a century ago, DeMarinis constructs machines that reveal normally unseen physical forces at play. In his pieces, flames become loudspeakers resonating with the voices of dictators (Firebirds, 2004); gum wrappers act as capacitors for radio tuners (Four Foxhole Radios, 2000); and music is encoded into streams of water, playing when the water hits an umbrella (RainDance/Music Acuatica, 1998). Calling a flame a loudspeaker isn’t to speak metaphorically, by the way. The flames really do emit sound, achieved via jets of flaming propane that are electromagnetically modulated by relative fluctuations between charged
diodes.
'So much for the magic act; how did he make the leap from flame to sound in the first place? “In the case of Firebirds...it was really a happenstance occurrence. I was sitting around [a fire with friends] in 1975...and there was a pause in the conversation and we heard, coming out of a jet of gas in the log, the end of a pop song and the beginning of an announcer’s voice. It was AM radio coming out of this little gas jet. It was just one of the strangest things. We looked at each other...and we said, ‘wow, that’s a treasure,’” he recalls, laughing.
'One of the first artists to incorporate computers into his works, he is keen also to exhume abandoned technologies of the past. DeMarinis’s clever reinterpretation of lost technologies adds an air of magic to physical phenomena.
'“There’s the famous dictum of Arthur C. Clarke that if we encountered a civilization only moderately advanced beyond our own technologically, that everything they did would seem like magic .... I think you can work that in reverse too; if you encounter one of these technologies that’s old by only a few decades, people often perceive those things as magical: ‘How can sound come out of a fire?’ Because it’s never been marketed.”'-- Ambidextrous Magazine
_____
5 works
______
Dust (2009)
'Images of the faces of missing children are projected piecemeal onto a surface covered with phosphorescent pigment powder. The image accumulates and the trace of faces is left behind as a green glow. Low frequency sounds vibrate the powder, transforming the image into abstract patterns of sound waves.
'Everybody collects something. In 1987 I started collecting missing children flyers.
'I don’t know whether it is just a local phenomenon, but in San Francisco there are mail advertisements featuring local automobile brake and clutch repair joints on one side, and on the other, images, usually a pair of images, of a child who has gone missing. The image on the left is a picture of the child at the time of disappearance, the image on the right is either an age-progression by an artist of what the child might look like now (often decades later) or a picture of the abductor, most frequently one of the child’s parents. Sometimes there is no picture on the right — probably the most worrisome case.
'These cards are usually the first item of junk mail to throw out, but it was not contrariness that made me start collecting them. Rather, a project beckoned: I was immediately struck by the likeness between the two images — the child and the age-progressed child, or the child and the parent. The project would have been kinetic, media-archaeological, probably inspired by Christian Boltanski’s work from that period. Suffice it to say, some inner editor nixed the realization of that one. But I continue, to this day, to collect these most worthless items of junk mail, even as my own horizon of what constitutes surplus information has expanded.
'Dust presents a fragment of this collection of likeness-pairs, scanned sequentially into the light-memory of phosphorescent powder. After a few minutes of exposure to the projected image, the powder retains a faint green image of the two faces on its surface, something akin to the »latent image« of photographic film or the veil of memory. Unlike photographic film, though, the image starts to distort. Propelled by low frequency sound vibrations, the powder starts to flow and dance, first distorting the faces and erasing their likeness, then distorting them into patterns* of abstract light in motion, with form and beauty all its own.
'*These abstract patterns are known as »Chladni« patterns after the late 18th c. German physicist of that name. They were the first observed and studied images of sound, and their discovery attracted much attention, promising insight into the nature of vibration. Napoleon, the emperor of France, offered a prize to anyone who could rigorously explain the relationship between the visual patterns and the sound. The prize was claimed in the end, by the mathematician Sophie Germain, who determined that the patterns are in fact a consequence of the shape and material of the vibrating surface, rather than the frequency or spectral characteristics of the sound.'-- Paul DeMarinis
_________
RainDance (2010)
'In 1837 the physicist Félix Savart observed that sound vibrations can affect the visual appearance of a jet of water. Subsequent studies determined that the patterns of fluctuations caused by the sound actually reproduce certain aspects of the sound if they fall on a drum.
'RainDance builds on this phenomenon of physics to create an interactive and literally immersive sound environment where people can explore “musical” streams of water with umbrellas.
'Water is passed through specially designed “modulation nozzles” that impose the vibrations of audio frequencies onto the stream of droplets. For example, 440 vibrations per second results in a stream of 440 water droplets emitted from the nozzle per second. When these droplets fall on a resonant surface such as an umbrella, the tone of A above middle C is reproduced.
'In this way various familiar melodies can be reproduced. With different streams, multiple-part harmonies or mixtures of disparate materials can be generated.'-- Soundart.zkm.de
_________
pneuma (2010)
'Paul DeMarinis'pneuma featured speakers whose cones would rise and fall in sync while playing the sound of an individual (different for each speaker) sleeping and dust would project images onto phosphorescent powder (in a darkened room) that would then remain when the light source was removed...then subjected to low frequency tones causing them to distort, eventually becoming changed like a shaken etch-a-sketch, but actually forming patterns of "abstract light in motion"...a thoughtful meditation on impermanence, even in a way, mortality.'-- Jeff Kaiser
___________
The Messenger (1998)
'In The Messenger, email messages received over the internet are displayed letter by letter on three alphabetic telegraph receivers: a large array of 26 talking washbasins, each intoning a letter of the alphabet in Spanish; a chorus line of 26 dancing skeletons and a series of 26 electrolytic jars with metal electrodes in the form of the letters A to Z that oscillate and bubble when electricity is passed through them.'-- turbulence.org
'The Messenger is an internet-driven installation based on early proposals for the electrical telegraph, in particular those made by the Catalan scientist Francisco Salvo. As in many of my works I examine the metaphors encoded within technology, especially lost or orphaned technologies and try to trace their origins, speculating on the way that mechanisms are the repositories of larger unspoken conceptions and dreams. In The Messenger I take the telegraph as a point of departure from which to examine the relationship between electricity and democracy, and how electrical telecommunication technologies have participated in our solidarity and in our isolation, in our equality and our oppression, in the richness of our experience and the uncertainty of our lives.'-- Paul DeMarinis
______________
The Edison Effect
'A series of interactive sculptures that play ancient phonograph records with laser beams. The reflections of light from the walls of the groove carry the audio information to photoelectric devices where it is translated first into an electrical signal, then into sound by a loudspeaker. The resultant sounds range from recognizable to distorted, something like a distant shortwave radio or a haunting bit of a melody just barely remembered. The arrangment of optics, motors and light allow random access to the grooves of the records, permitting distortion, dis-arrangement and de-composition of the musical material.
'Each Edison Effect player is a meditation on some aspect of the relations among music, memory and the passage of time. Our sense of time, memory, and belonging have all been changed by the exact repetition implicit in mechanical recording. The needle in the groove, no less than the needle in the vein, is one symbolic emblem on our quixotic quest for the perfect moment of fulfillment. Re-played here, without needles, the record becomes what it really is: a holographic object, a simultaneous smorgasbord to be consumed in the order and taste we see fit. The raw and raucous noises of the record surface commingle with the sounds inscribed in the groove, creating a havoc of misinterpreted intentions and benign accidents.
'The phonograph and the photograph have a coeval history of influence and development. The Edison Effect players demonstrate the photographic nature of acoustic recordings. These pinhole ( or needlepoint ? ) pictures of sounds long vanished project the shadows of sounds. Holograms, gamma rays, goldfish and cunieform serve to emphasize the parallel narrative of the mechanization of image and sonic inscription.'-- Paul DeMarinis
Video: 'The Edison Effect'
________________
The Edison Effect: Individual works
____________
'Al & Mary Do the Waltz'
'A turn-of-the-century Edison wax cylinder of Strauss'"Blue Danube Waltz" is turned on a paint roller rotated by a motor and rubber band. A laser beam is focused on the groove of the cylinder and its reflections are translated into sound. The laser beam passes through a bowl of goldfish who occasionally interrupt the beam to produce uncomposed musical pauses.'-- PDM
____________
'Dinner at Ernies'
____________
'Ich auch Berlin(er)'
'A tribute to the Berlin(er) brothers, Emil, Irving, and John Fitzgerald. A gelatin dichromate hologram of a 78 rpm record of the "Beer Barrel Polka" is rotated on a transparent turntable and played by a green laser. Once I realized that only light reflections were needed to make the recorded grooves audible, it became apparent that a hologram (the memory of light reflecting from a surface) would suffice to play music. Here, sans needle, sans groove, the band plays on.'-- PDM
_____________
'Lecture of Comrade Stalin'
_____________
'Fragments from Jericho'
'An authentic recreation of what is probably the world's most ancient audio recording. A clay cylinder inscribed (by intention or accident?) with voices from the past. By gently turning a large black knob, you can direct the laser beam across the surface of the turning clay vessel to eavesdrop on vibrations from another age.'-- PDM
______________
'Fireflies Alight on the Abacus of Al-Farabi'
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'Un-raveled Melody'
'Mechanical recording exerted its effects upon music composition by coercing preexisting rondo forms into ever tighter spirals. A hologram of Ravel's ""Bolero" cycles forever, as the laser beam weaves its path along the dance floor.'-- PDM
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'Murder by Television'
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'Rhondo in Blew a la Cold Turkey'
'A 78 of "Rhapsody in Blue" is erratically scanned by a laser beam emitting from a hypodermic syringe. We may contemplate the addictive act of record listening as Oscar Levant plays himself playing Gershwin in another tired remake of "An American [Junkie] in Paris".'-- PDM
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Lecture
Essay in lieu of a Sonata
Paul DeMarinis
My title "The Edison Effect" has multiple references. It refers first to the profound and irreversible effect the invention of sound recording has had upon music, the soundscape, upon the time and place of our memory and sense of belonging. It should also call to mind Thomas Alva Edison's illicit claim to the invention of the light bulb, and his general propensity for copying and appropriation as an emblem of the inherently uncertain authorship of all recorded works. Finally, it invokes a metaphorical allusion to the physical phenomenon known as the "Edison Effect" wherein atoms from a glowing filament are deposited on the inner surface of light bulbs causing them to darken. It was this phenomenon of thermionic emission that, when understood, made possible the invention of the "audion" or vacuum tube. This, in turn, led to the development of sound amplification as well as radio, television and the earliest digital computers. The metaphorical image of the darkening of the light is an ancient one, recurring in the I-Ching, in Mazdaism, and in Shakespeare's oxymoronic "when night's candles have burnt out". Enantiodromic reversal at the atomic level can be used to symbolize opposing primal forces and may serve to mythicize otherwise commonplace occurrences.
Edison's name and face are synonymous with invention, brilliance and technological innovation. As the modern Prometheus, he lured millions toward the light. The light bulb, commonly believed to be his consummate invention, still stands as an iconic exclamation of ideas, innovation - the stroke of genius.1 The discovery of a potentially fatal flaw inherent in the invention - that the light-producing bulbs would themselves darken, causing them to cast shadows rather than light - was perceived by Edison to be a potential bug, a stain upon his brilliant reputation. To compound the paradox with irony, this is the only bona fide scientific phenomenon which bears the inventor's name. Whereas other nineteenth century colossi, such as Tesla, Ampere or Volta had basic units of measure or even third world nations named after them, Edison, universally resented by the scientific community and deemed by them a charlatan and promoter, was grudgingly awarded only this obscure and obscuring "effect" to immortalize his name.
It is often the case that a new medium's first major flaw or contradiction is destined to become its dominant metaphor. The disembodying upside-downness of Della Porta's camera obscura, the shadows created by light falling on Niepce's photographic emulsion producing a "negative" image, the montage necessitated by the frailty and shortness of early celluloid film - these have become the mechanophors which convey the richness and complexity of our experience. No less with the whole of Edison's oeuvre. Like the lightbulb, the phonograph casts its own unearthly shadows upon listening, upon our memory and our sense of time. It is the false and deceptive quality of the voice which emanates from the phonograph or gramophone, compounded by the mindless soliloquy of the of the broken record, which lends its root to our word "phony". The exact repetition of this falsehood ingrains itself in our memories, creating a sequence of recognition, anticipation and fulfillment which is in itself addictive and predictive. Prior to the invention of mechanical recording, references to the now commonplace phenomenon of a tune-running-thru-the-head appear absent from literature.
A dream of early phonographers was to read with their eyes the wiggly line inscribed by the needle as a lasting trace upon the wax - allowing the illiterate to write, the uncouth to compose, even the spirits of the dead to speak. Such efforts soon proved futile.4 The scopic impulse relentlessly afoot in western civilization appears to have been delayed by almost an epoch. If the nineteenth century had invoked sight alone to comprehend the infinity of space, ( superseding the eighteenth century's insistence that space is known by the sense of touch,) a more ancient tactile paradigm persisted in matters of memory, perhaps due to their traditional codings in the form of renaissance spatial-mnemonic systems. Until very recently - the 1980's, - the memorative act of audition still consisted of dragging a diamond stylus, fingernail-like, across a vinyl blackboard. As the needle played, it eroded the memory it touched. Ever so slightly, as the needle touched, the sounds present in the room in which it played were minutely engraved and added to the record.
Edison's earliest efforts were feeble impressions on tinfoil, easily erased by the act of playing them. Indeed, the first recording was so frail it only could reproduce once and then die. Later efforts in wax proved durable enough to be played dozens of times before the effects of the mechanism combined with the sounds in the environment would modify and erase them forever. And still each record was a unique object. The Edison laboratory's earliest cylinders of mass production were created by capturing the sound of an orchestra on twenty or more phonographs - the orchestra's output of a two minute waltz might thus amount to many hundred cylinders per day 5 . By the turn of the century, with the advent of electroplating and gold-molding, many thousands of records could be manufactured, sold, played, enjoyed and worn out before the orchestra would need to reconvene and intone the waltz anew. The escalation of this economic exercise culminates in the digital compact disc - a consumer item whose durability is adamantine and whose relation to the original soundwaves - thus its use-value - is determined wholly by the ruling taste. The laser touches but fleetingly upon the groove, the impact of its photons abrading no material whatsoever. The rupture is complete. The emancipation of memory from touch has been fulfilled. The age of the palimpsest is over.
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Further
Paul DeMarinis Webpage
CD: 'The Edison Effect: A Listener's Companion'
Paul DeMarinis @ Wikipedia
Video: Paul DeMarinis Profile @ Spark
Paul DeMarinis Artist Statement
Book: 'Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise'
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p.s. Hey. In a first for the blog, silent reader KD has gone back five years and taken the basics of an old post I made then enlarged, expanded, and reinvented it into a guest-post to call his own. Cool and interesting modus operandi for me, and I'm happy to see DeMarinis's work spotlit in a larger way here. I think that's all you need to know, so go forth or, rather, back up a ways and check everything out. Thank you a lot, KD! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. I don't have any links to the Rampling/ Sarkozy thing on hand, but, during the election, she was well known here as one of the "famous French" who were publicly and passionately supporting him along with people like Depardieu, Johnny Hallyday, and others. I don't think IC-B's work is camp at all. I think that's an imposition. It's true that she's beloved among a lot of literary types who happen to be gay, and a number of that type whom I know, but they never speak of her work as campy. Sublime, yes. I don't know of Zemmour or if she's dating him. I can try to ask around. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark! Yeah, it's hard for me to read more than, say, a dozen pages of ICB's prose before I'm overloaded and too swoony to continue. That density and richness, and how that heavily organizes how one reads her novels, is one of things that make me so in awe of her. How are you man? ** Joshua nilles, Hi. Beach Sloth is pretty much the only reviewer of a bunch of extremely good newer writers, which is very strange. Some day his pioneering, adventurous efforts will be recognized outside the scene, I'm sure. Cool, yeah, the price of being vegetarian is there. But then there are a lot of cuisines friendly to vegetarians that can be not that pricey at decent quality like Italian, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Thai, etc., etc. But, yeah, there's that. I just balance out buying my veggie stuff at health food stores by cutting back a bit on the buying of books, music, clothes, etc., I guess. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, She is utterly unique, and I highly recommend trying her work because there is nothing else like it. You'll know pretty quickly whether her prose is crush worthy or not. I know all about the lengthy time involved in rendering, for sure. Awesome! Tick, tick, ... ** Keaton, Everyone, celebrate Xmas two days early by reading what looks for all the world to be a Xmas story unlike any other in the most positive respect by, yes, Keaton (!), and, yes, right here (!)'. It's beautifully titled 'Lepreclaus', a title of which I personally am extremely envious. Hi. Oh, man, 'Adieu au Langage' was the best thing I saw, read, listened to, ate, etc. this year, I think. Super inspiring. My head has been swarming with things I want to try in my writing ever since. I haven't read Jane Austen since my brief year at university. And Henry James, yeah, good stuff, but not my thing. It is almost Xmas. It's freaky. I have to go look at all the Paris Xmas makeover stuff really fast. Bon holidays to you! ** Steevee, Hi. Well, I know about that TLC Mormon show because about a third of the people in FB feed posted about it two days ago, yeah. If I were Stateside and sans something else to do, I would watch at least 15 minutes of it, I guess, just to know. You gonna try it? ** Misanthrope, Cool, she rules. I got hacked or something, I forget, a few years ago and devised the most complicated password humanly possible for my mail, blog, etc., and I've been safe ever since, but it's too complicated a password to be memorize-able, at least by me, so it gets me into all kinds of trouble when I forget to bring a slip of paper scribbled with the password wherever I go. There must be a happy medium. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. Really, you want all those eyes? Why? Do you mind explaining why? When I imagine that, my whole body starts itching and my pores feel like they're going to vomit. Obviously, I'm thinking way too practically about the question. I know of 'The Innocents', but, weirdly, I don't think I've ever seen it. Huh. Yeah, I really should. Might make a nice Xmas movie. Oh, your question today is extremely easy. 'Father Sgt. Christmas Card' by Guided by Voices. One of very favorite songs in any season. What's your choice? ** Rewritedept, Hi. Ha ha, IC-B is so incredibly not FH-B, ha ha. It's like Antarctica versus Hawaii or something. Sounds like avoiding your brother is a smart move. I have one brother whom I hope to avoid for the rest of his or my life. Finches do seem like they would be rad. I'm getting as much non-film work done as I can, but there's film work to do that isn't editing, so my headway is not a headwind. On Xmas day, me? Probably squat. Nobody's around. Eat a Buche, go enjoy the extreme quiet of Paris on that day, I don't know. Xmas over here is usually just like a post-nuclear Sunday or something. Which is fine. Good day to you, man. ** Okay. If you will, investigate what Paul DeMarinis does under the the guidance of KD because both aspects are very cool. See you tomorrow.