More about the project
Firebirds is work that examines a power complex of inter-relationships between fire and language from a diverse variety of technical, historical, and metaphorical viewpoints. The fact that speech is made of sound is not always apparent as we speak, listen, read, and are transported to the inner recesses of conversation. But electronic media, the radio in particular, reconfigured our culture's perception of the relationship between speech and sound for most of the twentieth century. Surely the transformation of speech into signal, signal into wave, to recording and playback make apparent that meaning is forever cast as sound, sound as signal, signal as noise and onward.
For all its power and potential for terror, the course taken by the political leaders'
voice is no less technological. In the end, it is only a wave in the air, a scratch in the
groove. Sound with all its attendant artifacts of recording, transmission, reception, makes
this evident. The voices of Firebirds are drawn from original speeches by Joseph Stalin,
Benito Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler, all from the years 1935-36. The
source of the sound is actually a flame, modulated by high voltage audio fields.
Among the pioneers of radio, a lonely and lovesick young man, Lee De Forest, sat
in his modest apartments in New Haven in 1904, searching for a breakthrough invention
in radio to catapult him to fame and fortune. While tapping his Hertzian telegraph key he
noticed that the flames of his gas chandeliers would jump and ebb with each transmitted
dot and dash. Certain that he had discovered a revolutionary new and sensitive receiver
for radio waves, he wrote up several patents for devices embodying his discovery. Long
before the patents were duly issued, De Forest learned that the modulation of the flames
was caused not by radio waves, but by the sound of the tapping of his key, thus
replicating the discoveries in the 1850s by LeConte and Tyndall. Unperturbed, and
possessed by the ideé fixe that the flame must be the sensitive receiver of Hertzian waves,
he forged on. Piggybacking on work carried out recently by Ambrose Fleming in
England, and earlier by Elster and Geitel in Berlin, De Forest began encapsulating his
experiments inside light bulbs, replacing the dancing flame with the glowing filament. By
insight or perseverance or just blind luck, De Forest succeeded in producing, in 1906, the
Audion, or vacuum tube, an efficient amplifier that was to make radio the vast medium it later
became and usher in the electronic era: television, radar, computers that dominated
most of the twentieth century. De Forest's invention presents us with an intersection in a
moment in time, 1906, the age of electric lighting, when the flames of candles and gas
jets were everywhere being locked up in glass bottles, and at the same time all the words and messages running through wires were leaking out into Maxwellian space as communication became radiant.
The flames of Firebirds are an examination of the collision of voice, meaning,
material inscription, and collective space as it existed briefly in that historical moment.
That sound can emerge directly from gaseous space, without a solid vibrating elements of
the loudspeaker has been a phenomenon noted since the earliest days of electronic
technology. A number of attempts to introduce this phenomenon into general usage
ensued. All failed. In 1924 Lorenz AG of Berlin marketed a Kathodophone, an early form
of plasma tweeter. This was basically a triode opened to the air coupled to a small horn.
In the early 1950s, S. Klein elaborated on this principle and described an electrothermal
horn loudspeaker using a rich mixture of platinum and iridium to project ultrasonic
Lee De Forest’s Audion waves. In 1967 military researchers at United Technologies Corporation in Sunnyvale published a paper in Nature describing the form of electrothermal transducer used in Firebirds. An electrically modulated oxyacetylene flame, seeded with potassium ions, is
made to vibrate the air. As the air around the flame is instantaneously heated and cooled,
expanding waves of sound vibration are produced in the air, creating an omnidirectional
sound source. The speaking flames of Firebirds follow in this succession of orphaned
technologies – devices that actually work but failed to enter the dominant discourse.
Paul DeMarinis