Reflections

Just got back from the engraver's this morning to look at the final assembly of the pieces I'm sending off to the Chelsea Art Museum for next week's opening of the Notations21 show there. And it's remarkable going back through the process the engraver and I have collectively engineered over the last couple of months to project notation directly into glass.

Dozens and dozens of industrial engraving processes. There are processes for engraving on glass, on metal, on wood, and on every type of stone. There are processes for engraving on concrete and brick and even asphalt. Different types of laser, acid, UV- and photo-reactive film all make an appearance, depending on the detail of the work, whether the product is to be seen indoors or out, the thickness of the engraving target, and the depth and coloration of the resulting incisions in the body of the piece.

The glass panels we've put together for the show in Chelsea are 13 x 19" and engraved with several thousand individual vectors taken from the parts of the score to Reiko's flute piece that we premiered earlier this year in Berlin. The postscript sourcefiles drive a laser powered by the three different highly excitable gases. The laser etches directly into a sticky green film which adheres to the obverse side of each panel. The dots, flags, noteheads, stafflines and other symbols the laser cuts through the film open spaces in the mask and leave the gestalt collection of symbols in the piece open and exposed for the next step in the process, which is treatment with fine, 220-grit sand blown at 90 PSI directly at the back of each panel. Demasking follows -- always done only by hand -- and takes several hours. The entire piece is then washed in an acetone bath and rubbed with a dry cloth.

What results are whitened, calligraphic bits of score code showing back-to-front through completely transparent media.

Backgrounding becomes important. Hold each panel up to black and the symbols pop. Next to white, they evanesce.



There's an ambiguity to all this. Glass makes both the agent and the object of the the traditional microscope, in, respectively, the lens and the slide. What other materials becomes both agent and object of a type of seeing?

And then glass traps whatever may be its contents in equal measure to the degree in which it lets pass our view.

Slides? What do molecular biologists use in place or slides?

the source of energy driving biological motions

Beckett in Berio

Mahler. Symphony no. 2, movement III (of V), 1888 - 94.
Marked "In ruhig fliessender Bewegung":





Berio. Sinfonia, movement III (of V), 1968 - 69.
Marked "In ruhig fliessender Bewegung":





"... this represents at least a thousand words I wasn't counting on ..."

Pervertebrate Paramecium

Beckett on Biology

My uncle reminded me of the opening lines of The Unnamable this morning. It made me think of you and enzymes and embryonic cell fate decisions:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

A decentered biology

So we talk and I have to update image after image and image to keep up. Whatever ideas I have about the mechanics of the passing of secret messages break under the weight of your epigenetics.

DNA is still the repository; check. RNA still transient? Um, kinda. But these 'maternal effect' factors? This stuff that hangs out in the cortex ... who the hell cares about the cortex? I couldn't ante up a damn thing about the cortex. The nucleus is where all the information lives, right? And information equals control, and control is what manages change, and development is change, and so the nucleus is center stage for development ...

Or maybe not.

The cell divides and somewhere by 8 or 16 or something daughter cells differentiation sets in. Something is inside, something is outside. And nowhere in any of the stuff they shoved down our throats in school was there any clue of a reason as to why differentiation actually happened: the daughter cells all have the same DNA, right?

But what if precisely that stuff that's hanging out in the cortex can actually play a role? What if the stuff that's hanging out in the cortex isn't distributed evenly around a too-smooth sphere but actually has a COMPLEX PATTERN -- or maybe better a complex SERIES OF PATTERNS -- to its distribution. And what if the patterning inherent in the distribution of the magic stuff of the cortex matters precisely because the different daughter cells grab different parts of the cortical information as they cleave?

More head blowing up. Because what happens is that the intolerably round, intolerably centered model of the perfect egg dissolves: we can't answer the question of fundamental differentiation when there's too much symmetry, that is, when we think according to too perfect a model. The tyranny of the sphere. What's needed is precisely asymmetry in an amount enough to decenter the model. Enter the edge of the cell as the source and keep of just the asymmetry we need. And we start to explain why we get a head over here but a tail over there.

If this is right -- if magic stuff living in the remote edges of the cell acts as type of control over the all-important information in the central repository that is DNA -- then what we have is a decentered biology. A molecular biology that yields up the secrets of its center in its first 60 years and opens its edges only now.

RNA as the winged messenger. How else to explain how the stuff at the edges -- in the form of these maternal effect factors -- can actually effect control? Stuff, in the form of (m)RNA has to visit the factors present in the cortex. And so a new image: a visit there and back again as critical to development. This is the image of the pilgrimage.

Put it together and the centered repository part of the model sticks around. But the model augments centralization with control from the periphery. All by means of developmental pilgrimage upon developmental pilgrimage.

As you get closer and closer to the image of the epigenome I see colors. Literally. A dusting of green and sapphire specks, scattered rainbow colors in the shadows of the cell, patterned to control, to help, to develop, to break a tyranny of too much symmetry.