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?
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3 comments:
My blog alerts for glass engraving have lead me to your page. I am reading with great interest, although most intellectual chat goes straight over my head....I am just a humble glass engraver! I am intrigued by your music (I love classical) and especially interested in how you are going to display your glass.
I wish you the best of luck with your exhibition.
Lesley (Pyke)
www.lesleypyke.com
Thanks so much for the comment, Lesley. Piraye and I have Google alerts set up for a couple of things; clever to set one for engraving, too!
You engrave everything it would appear from looking at your page. Very cool. And I guess this is one of the things I've learned collaborating with my engraver here in Austin: that the variety of engraving processes that you guys have is enormous. I was quite surprised to find that there are ways to engrave on curved surfaces and even through the back side of mirrors. There's a lot that's very technical and very beautiful in the work that you guys do. And there's something very appealing about that to me as a composer.
Thanks for the wishes for the exhibition! My music is classical ... but what you might call avant-garde classical. You can see some notation and read about some of the pieces at www.trevorbaca.com ... and if you shoot me an email with your physical mailing address I'll send you a CD and you can take a listen for yourself.
Best wishes for many projects and beautiful engraving.
:-)
Trevor.
So any news from the opening?
Have been thinking about this question you pose:
What other materials becomes both agent and object of a type of seeing?
The human eye. I've have in my head Schrodingers argument that in order to achieve the level of complexity required to conceive of a single atom, we had to loss the sensitivity to perceive single atoms. When I look into your eyes, the eye is both the agent and the object of seeing.
To answer your question about slides, we (molecular biologists) use them as well. Glass is the only material that conducts enough light and is solid enough to immobilize objects. And there is a whole field dedicated to making similar etchings as you made, but on a nano scale.
Perhaps when we are done with the perpetuum piece, we should have the score etched on microscope slides through some method that causes the notes to autofluoresce, then I can image them with the same microscopy technique that yielded the primary data for a full circle. We could then make large display prints of the scanned images to accompany the performance.
Hope your lecture in Ireland is going well. And that Vienna is a success as well.
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