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?
Posts
