Paul Demarinis: Gray Matter Text.

Paul Demarinis: Gray Matter Text. 

Our electronic media may be regarded, in large part, as the outgrowths of
nineteenthe century laboratory apparatuses designed to isolate and investigate
the functioning of human sensory organs.
 Viewed thus, they fracture the wholeness 
of sensation in an effort to preserve, replay or transmit over distance the 
specters of our sensory experiences. But Victorian science, obsessed as it was 
with isolation, analysis and reduction, had a goofy side too, a far reaching 
interest in the discovery and creation of chimeras - impossible combinations of 
two distinct beings, griffins gargoyles etc - both natural and artificial. In 
particular, the age of the inventor was also the age of the tinkerer, the 
combiner, the patenter of hybrid forms. No natural zoology could have 
engendered derby-hat cameras, bicycle hammocks and swearing tops. Perhaps every 
attempt to reconstitute the sensory wholeness allegedly lost by recording & 
transmitting media may be regarded as a chimera, the foremost survivor which 
has been the sound-cinema with its uneasy pact between sight and sound serving 
to perpetuate a myth of synesthesia. But a host of other teratogeny were, and 
are, being spawned, tried, rejected and occasionally marketed in a ceaseless 
attempt to achieve multimedia.

There is a popularly promoted belief that technology drives culture forward, 
and that our changing relationships to one another, material and informational, 
are the result of advances made by science and are manifested in the 
development of new materials, processes and tools. Gilles Deleuze points out 
the flaw in this thinking: "... technology makes the mistake of considering 
tools in isolation: tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they 
make possible or that make them possible."  A glance at the incredible variety 
of possible technologies that have fallen along the wayside serves to support 
this view. 

The present work lurches forward to examine one such forgotten technology - one 
that failed to acknowledge the rupture between hearing and feeling that is, 
touching. There is no clear cognitive border between feeling and hearing. Most 
certainly indistinguishable in the womb, these are the two sensations with 
which we have the longest continuous experience. The invention of sound 
recording, initially incapable of reproducing low and palpable frequencies, 
exacerbated a rupture between touching and hearing that had been building 
through several centuries of notated music. By the last decades of the 19th 
century, audible and feelable vibration had become so dissociated that 
inventors were having a difficult time understanding the relations between 
waves, vibrations and electrical undulations. A great many chimeric inventions 
resulted, among which is the telephone, commonly regarded as the work of one 
man.

Alexander Graham Bell had won his renown as a teacher of the deaf - patients 
who conveniently manifested the aforementioned rupture by being able to feel 
but not hear. Bell's teaching methods relied upon lip reading only in part - 
the greater part of his expertise lay in conveying missed auditory information 
to his pupils by touching their hands in a defined grammar of strokes. This 
special knowledge gave him a distinct advantage over the many other inventors 
racing to formulate and patent what was to be the invention of the century. 
When the great race was won, Bell was the victor, filing his caveat on February 
14, 1875. As bad luck would have it, five hours later that same day Elisha Gray 
staggered breathless into the patent office with his application for the 
telephone. 

There is no room here for an examination of the trajectories Bell and Gray had 
followed to arrive at the similar apparatus in 1876. Suffice it to say they 
were different and in their diversity had given birth to many technological 
curiosities and chimeras, not least of which was Elisha Gray's "musical 
bathtub" of 1874. In "Mechanization Takes Command" Siegfried Giedion has 
pointed out the Victorian era's preoccupation with the mechanization of bodily 
functions, from weaving and skinning to cooking and bathing. Elisha Gray's  
fusion of bathing technology with audio technology and playing music is one 
more chimera ornamenting the den of 19th century monstrosities.

"In late January or early February of 1874 [Gray] heard the refrain of the 
rheotome issuing from his bathroom, where he found his young nephew 'taking 
shocks' to amuse the smaller children. With a vibrating rheotome in the circuit 
of a primary induction coil, the boy connected one end of the secondary coil to 
the zinc lining of the bathtub and held the other end in his hand. When the 
boy's free hand glided along the bathtub lining, it produced a whining sound in 
tune with the rheotome. Gray tried the effect and found that quick, hard 
rubbing made the noise even louder than that of the rheotome itself. When he 
varied the pitch of the rheotome, the noise followed suit."

[IMAGE OF MUSICAL BATHTUB]

By some obscure and little studied phenomenon, a vibrating electrical field 
seems to modulate the coefficient of friction of our skin, so that when we bow 
across an electrified surface with our fingers, we excite mechanical 
vibrations. These mechanical vibrations, suitably coupled, give rise to audible 
sounds. I discovered this phenomenon, as Gray did, quite accidentally in 1976, 
and I'm sure other people run across it every day. In a sense, Gray's discovery 
was likelier than ours, being as he was much closer to the era of Benjamin 
Franklin and Mary Shelley, when electricity, life force and neural sensation 
were believed to consist of one in the same fluid. 

As we stroke the wires of "Gray Matter", we both feel as texture and hear as 
sound the faint electrical stirrings within the wire - melodies, scales, 
creakings and glissandi inhabit a world in which touch and hearing are for a 
moment unified. This phenomenon may someday find a fit to the structure of our 
relations - perhaps as electrically definable surface textures, audio 
communication in a vacuum, or other applications. But for now it languishes in 
the backwater of the culturally inappropriate, insignificant and obscure.

{IMAGE OF WASHBASIN RECEIVER]

Several pieces in this collection is based on Gray's later version of an 
electrical sound maker. Based on a more familiar electromagnetic design, it is 
a direct forerunner of the familiar loudspeaker and became part of Gray's 
telephonic apparatus of 1875. Of interest to me is that it retains the 
connection to bathing apparatus in the form of a washbasin. Wisdom aside, one 
wonders, had Gray beat Bell to the patent office, if our telephones might not 
"ring", and if we might not enter the washcloset to speak afar, stroking small 
tin tubs as we listen.



(c) Paul DeMarinis 1995

My thanks to Xerox PARC for their support in the development of this work, and 
to Eiko Do Espirito Santo for her assistance in preparation of the sound 
materials.