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PYROGLYPHS 1994

A VIDEO MATRIX BY STEINA
IN COLLABORATION WITH TOM JOYCE
The initial inspiration for Pyroglyphs was the ancient art of blacksmithing but it soon became a musical treatise . . . In Steina’s words: “In 1994 I spent long hours with blacksmith Tom Joyce, videotaping the process of building an iron gate. I found iron gates a little too concrete, so I closed in on the intense and violent nature of materials being manipulated by torches, files, and anvils—the rapid flicker of flames. . . . Tom and I share a fascination with fire — as a phenomenon and as a medium that transforms other materials . . . as a medium of transmutation.”

Steina videotaped, mostly in closeup, the activities of blacksmithing (hammering, filing, welding, manipulating fire), the phenomenology of fire (flames, sparks, combustions, glowing metals), and various improvised scenes — a vise crushing a timber, a stack of books burning, paper and wood being scorched.
Editing this material into three complementary image tracks was relatively easy (the visuals were similar or disimilar in compatible ways) but the sounds of those images were often too similar or too strident, competing for attention. So the sounds determined the editing. Steina processed them through digital devices like harmonizers, which couldn’t turn the random noises into harmonics but produced interesting sounds anyway; pitch shifters that move a sound to the octave immediately above or below; and reverb circuits to create echo effects. The sounds and rhythms are rendered allegro con brio, pianoforte, or pianissimo: there is a lot of percussive hammering, say, then all is quiet and we hear only crackling flame or the hollow whisper of the blowtorch. . . .
PYROGLYPHS is a spectacular meditation on fire. Steina has created a sublime landscape illumined by the many-hued glow of fevered metals and shows of sparkling scintilla. She makes us feel the hypnotic pull of lambent flames even as our breath is caught by the preemptive ignition of the torch, our hearts quickened by the violence of the forge.
— GENE YOUNGBLOOD
 
D E S C R I P T I O N
In PYROGLYPHS, fifteen (or eighteen) monitors are arranged in a circle on the floor facing up and inward at a 30 degree angle. The viewer stands outside this circle looking in.
Three channels of video program recorded on laser disk players provide one video and two audio sources each routed to a circle of video monitors with internal speakers (see drawing for assignment).The laser disk players are aligned by a synchronizer for synchronous playback. Each player at the end of its twenty-minute cycle automatically returns and re-synchronizes for a continuous performance.