Last week I stopped by Braunstein / Quay Gallery for the opening of new work by Paul DeMarinis. Standing in the room were a number of bird cages with bunsen burner-like flames roosting in them. Every once in a while one of these caged flames - Firebirds, he titled them - would begin to speak in the sonorous tones of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin, apparently modulated by the scratchy echo of early radio broadcasts. It was like magic. What was going on? Where was the sound coming from?
Paul explained the broad outlines of the process to me, but who can remember details like that at an opening? There is precious little information on the Web, except for some hints in a nice human interest segment from the "Technophiles" episode of KQED's Spark program. [Watch video.] So here is my best guess reconstruction. Caveat emptor.
"The slightest tap on a distant anvil causes it to fall to seven inches. When a bunch of keys is shaken, the flame is violently agitated, and emits a loud roar. The dropping of a sixpence into a hand already containing coin, knocks the flame down. The creaking of boots sets it in violent commotion. The crumpling or tearing of a bit of paper, or the rustle of a silk dress does the same. Responsive to every tick of a watch held near it, it falls and explodes. The winding up of a watch produces tumult. From a distance of thirty yards we may chirrup to this flame, and cause it to fall and roar. Repeating a passage from the Faerie Queene, the flame sifts and selects the manifold sounds of my voice, noticing some by a slight nod, others by a deeper bow, while to others it responds by violent agitation."
"a gas flame so arranged that under a suitable adjustment of pressure it is exceedingly sensitive to sounds, being caused to roar, flare, or become suddenly shortened or extinguished, by slight sounds of the proper pitch."
Resurrecting arcana such as this is Paul's specialty. As he says in the Sparks piece, "I like these orphan technologies." And he usually adds a twist.
"I've made some works with sound-sensitive lights, that would blink on and off when a soundwave passes by. I did a little piece in Amsterdam the other night, it's a little bit of a hokey piece but there's a sensitive flame from a gas burner, and I have a player, a violinist, play sounds whose waves would cause the sound to actually move, and jump around. And I wanted the player to be as far away as possible. If you put her up close, you'd say, well that's obvious, but what isn't obvious is if she's far away from the flame to show that sound travels across space."
In a sense, this is how you might expect a sensitive flame to be played. With Firebirds, however, DeMarinis inverts the process. The flame actually becomes an omnidirectional speaker. Activated by polarized electric currents, it pressurizes the air around it to radiate audio frequency sounds - to become an actual speaker, rather than simply reacting to external sound waves. DeMarinis did not invent the so-called flame speaker, but I suspect he is the only person that has used it to playback the speeches of political leaders from the "apex of the era of broadcast radio," as he puts it.
A must see listen, if you can make it. April 24 - May 22, 2004.
See also Jim Campbell'sSelf-Portrait of Paul DeMarinis (2003)
