Books by Christine Burgin
Margaret Watts Hughes: Sound May Be Seen
by Andrew Lampert, Christine Burgin
Ethereal and enigmatic glass slides preserve the resonance of Hughes' voice in rippling, organic compositions
The acclaimed Welsh singer and philanthropist Margaret Watts Hughes (1842-1907) was one of many inventors of her day fascinated by the visual documentation of sound. Her "eidophone" comprised a tube attached to a chamber covered in rubber, or "diaphragm." Hughes covered a glass slide with grains of sand or coarse pigment, then saturated it with water or milk. By singing into the device, the vibrations of her voice would etch out patterns onto the disc: an artistic rendering of the scientific principle of standing-wave resonance. Her "Voice Figures," as she called them, ranged from primitive patterns to designs resembling flowers, seashells and other natural phenomena. While Hughes valued her discovery for both its scientific and spiritual implications, leaders of the Theosophical movement saw her work as a means of making visible the invisible world.
Sound May Be Seen presents selections from Hughes' original 1891 publication of the "Voice Figures" and a rare surviving set of her glass slides, alongside contemporary reactions to her captivating and ultimately enigmatic work.
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Thomas Wilfred: Clavilux and Lumia Home Models
by Andrew Lampert, Christine Burgin
Wilfred's pioneering and strangely prescient musical instrument predates television, video art and psychedelia
Inventor, designer, artist and musician Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form--"Lumia," or the art of light. He invented his own version of a color organ (a term he disliked) and dubbed it the Clavilux, from the Latin meaning "light played by key." After a successful international tour in the 1920s, Wilfred reinvented these large-scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for domestic entertainment. While they enjoyed a short commercial life, Wilfred's aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models soon found their way into storied collections. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1952 exhibition 15 Americans, where it was seen by many artists who would work with light as their medium in the 1960s and '70s.
Clavilux and Lumia Home Models presents a stimulating collection of archival material culled from the Wilfred archive at Yale University and other sources, including Wilfred's never-before-published sketches.
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