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Semiconductor is the alias of Brighton-based duo Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, who since 1999 have been making stunning, cutting-edge digital artworks in the form of sound-films, music videos and live animation. Guided by their obsessive interests in landscape, architecture, geology, geography, chaos/systems theory and artificial intelligence, they explore the varied processes of digital animation and the computer’s potential to unite sound and image. This DVD offers a comprehensive overview of their work over the past five years, featuring 3 music videos (including those for múm and QT?), 4 live cinema pieces, and 6 short films. With a career trajectory straddling the worlds of high art (gallery installations including Venice Biennale, Prague Contemporary Arts Festival, and at the ICA in London), music (videos for Dat Politics, Aco, and FatCat artists múm and QT?, video for a Warp Records compilation, and usage in an MTV campaign), and science (a recent artist residence at NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, CA), Semiconductor are a uniquely appropriate subject for FatCat’s first foray into the world of DVD. “Brilliant Noise,” one product of Semiconductor’s time with NASA, is a film made from footage of the sun’s surface, comes with 11 audio interpretations by musicians including Max Richter, Cristian Vogel, Ensemble, Twilight Sad, Disinformation, Antenna Farm, and more.
| Catalog Number: MC-680 |
Type: Shorts Compilation |
Genre: Video Art / Film Art |
| Copyright: 2007 |
Length: |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC & PAL |
ISBN: |
UPC: 600116121400 |
| Label: |
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Films In Compilation
Brilliant Noise directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2006,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:05:57
Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.
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200 Nanowebbers directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:02:49
For ‘200 Nanowebbers', Semiconductor have created a molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor's live soundtrack. Using custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale environment that shifts and contorts to the audio resonance. Layers of energetic hand drawn animations, play over the simplest of vector shapes that form atomic scale associations. As the landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline substances.
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Sound of Microclimates, The directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2004,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:08:20
The Sound of Microclimates reveals the sights and sounds of a series of unusual weather patterns in the Paris of today. Here, architecture has become interwoven with the natural processes of the geographical landscape. Set within the un-noticed moments in time, extreme microclimates are presented as the future in city accessories, revealing the unseen urban terrains of tomorrow.
Like the temporary staged events at an World Expo these weather patterns hi-light public spaces and architecture within the City or Paris. They exist as a series of weather observations that animate the evolution of the inanimate urban condition. Each microclimatic intervention has its own audible frequencies, where the sound from each environment animates the movement and reveals each sites unique narrative.
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Green Grass of Tunnel directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
Music,
2002,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:04:26
Green Grass Of Tunnel' is a music promo for Icelandic band Múm.Inspired by the mysterious terrain where the music was made and remodelling the very lighthouse and valley they lived in.
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Inaudible Cities: Part One directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2002,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:06:42
The first in a series of short films where cities are made of and controlled by sound. In this episode, every detail of an urban landscape is built by the sonic pressures of an oncoming electrical storm. The very fabric of this isolated world is defined by the noises and frequencies that surround a space in another aural dimension. Semiconductor wrote a program which listens to the various parts of the soundtrack and constructs the animated environments.
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QT qqq directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2001,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:01:00
Digital life is born into a pixel world where viruses battle it out for the survival of the fittest.
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Mini-Epoch-Series directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2003,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:04:17
The Mini-Epoch Series is Five one minute sound films, each installed on a 7" widescreen LCD display. Filmed, animated and exhibited in Palazzo Zenobio.
Screen One: Stop frame animation of a puddle drying up over a period of four hours in Palazzo Zenobio courtyard. Composited graphics represent population density fluctuating over hundreds of years according to the availability of water, as the lake depletes. The sound controls the statistics according to the rate of evaporation.
Screen Two: Stop frame animation of the sun moving across the floor of Palazzo Zenobio. Animated within the suns path are composited graphical representations of land use, which adapt to the availability of sunlight over thousands of years. The sound fluctuates consistent with the strength of sunlight, which in turn controls the transition of land use.
Screen Three: Fictional animation of the sun moving across a Palazzo Zenobio room and up the wall; made using actual data of the suns path for that time and place. We track the windows path across the wall as buildings are constructed in the city, forming animated silhouettes. The shadow from the encroaching city subsequently blocks out the light and sends the room into total darkness. Here we witness the construction of Venice's past or future over hundreds of years.
Screen Four: Stop frame animation of a peeling painted wall within the exhibition space. As the landscape shifts over thousands of years the inhabitants migrate across this vast desert-scape.
Screen Five: Animation bringing to life the motion of the Venetian architecture in the saturated terrain over hundreds of years.
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Earthquake Films directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2000,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:09:33
Songlines sung by an earthquake. This was an early live experiment performed at one of Semiconductors' E.M.I. (Electro Magnetic Interference) events in Brighton, 2000. It also formed part of a DVD-Rom section in Hi-Fi Rise, Semiconductors' first DVD release in 2001.
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All the Time in the World directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:04:40
Filmed and animated between October and March 2005 during a fellowship at Berwick Gymnasium Art Gallery, Berwick-Upon-Tweed, UK.Funded by English Heritage and Arts Council England North East.Presented as a fictional documentary, the Sound Film All the Time in The World sees the millions of years that have shaped and formed the land, played out at the speed of sound.
Semiconductor have reanimated Northumbria 's epic landscape using data recordings from the archives at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh . This data of local and distant seismic disturbances has been converted to sound and used to reveal and bring to life the constantly shifting geography around us.
We follow the motion of the sound as it travels from the coast at Cocklawburn to the hills of The Cheviots, transforming the land. We travel to Abb's Head and witness Earth Lights, made visible by the seismic sounds. These phenomena are said to be the result of tectonic movement in the strata below us. Flashes of light and electricity are produced as movement squeezes mineral crystals together, displaying luminous objects whose motion coincides with the direction of ruptures within the earth.
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Strata directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2002,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:09:24
Strata is a live performance tool that enables us to navigate our way through multiple layers of landscape in a 3-D real-time environment. Animated moments trigger sound. Additional live sound is performed on MAX/MSP.
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Sonic Inc. directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2006,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:12:00
Semiconductor's latest contribution to the genre of live cinema is their dedicated live performance software Sonic Inc ;a real-time 3D drawing tool that charts the beginning of an artificial world and its shapeless inhabitants. The visual aesthetic of Sonic Inc. moves away from the high-tech world of computer graphics and towards the inherent visual language of the computer as material. The slick complexity of current computer graphics is stripped back to reveal the basic building blocks of computational visual language. An unformed landscape evolves with simple “life forms” that grow according to the soundscape. Forming as basic structures and developing into creatures, they learn to move autonomously, grow, respond to and build their own environments. This progression reveals as much about the birth and development of the microchip as it does about the world it projects.
Sonic Inc's development was inspired by the challenge to create truly live image creation and manipulation. The program 'listens' to the sound input and creates and animates the landscapes and the creatures from scratch, according to Semiconductors real time inputs. Every element is controlled in real-time; the cameras, the viewpoint, the creation and application of image textures,the creature development, the landscape creation etc.
This is a multi-purpose program which can also be used as an improvisational tool, using a direct audio feed with live musicians.
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Do You Think Science... directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2006,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:12:15
By asking a group of space physicists the unanswerable Semiconductor reveal the hidden motivations driving scientists to the outer limits of human knowledge. In an attempt to find meaning within the question, they open a Pandora's Box of limitations within science itself, revealing their own philosophical confines. Issues of faith, medicine and the laws of matter are raised to illustrate the infinitely complex universe we live in.
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Digital Anthrax directed by
Semiconductor
United Kingdom,
New Media,
2002,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:04:42
A live performance were Semiconductor control and animate creatures, cameras and landscapes in real time. The environment is an architectural stage for the creatures to explore. This is an early version of what would later become Sonic Inc.
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2008-07-22 www.popmatters.com
By Matthew A. Stern
Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, who together comprise the video art outfit known as Semiconductor, spent time in 2005 as official artists in residence at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. The fact that NASA has an artists in residence program appears to be the kind of thing that Republicans find satisfaction in bitching about, as evinced by a transcript of a debate over an amendment to shut such programs down.
The transcript from the 2005 debate finds Indiana Republican Rep. Chris Chocola saying, “Nowhere in NASA’s mission does it say anything about advancing fine arts or hiring a performance artist.” This criticism is roughly tantamount to saying, “what the sam-hell does outer space have to do with art?” Semiconductor’s Worlds in Flux, a DVD of striking and cerebral visual explorations, effectively answers this question.
Worlds in Flux is a collection of five years’ worth of Semiconductor’s visually scintillating meditations on the nature of environments. Divided into three sections, the DVD features three music videos, four cinema pieces, and six short films. Each one ties music or ambient noise to the images on screen, conceptually kind of like Koyaanisqatsi (though visually, nothing like the Philip Glass/Godfrey Reggio collaboration.) As with Koyaanisqatsi, you can dig these short films under the influence of your preferred mind altering substance, or spend a lot of time mulling over their implications with a clear head.
The DVD begins with “Brilliant Noise”, a piece done by Semiconductor during their tenure at the Space Sciences Laboratory, which sets the tone for the collection. The piece features black and white footage of sunspots, obfuscated by static and an epileptic strobe. This close up view of the sun is accompanied by a minimal soundtrack that trembles and screams as bursts of light pulsate on a swirling black surface. In the hands of Semiconductor, the imagery feels alternately celestial and organic, if you didn’t know you were looking at footage of solar explosions, you could easily think that you were watching some biological process under a microscope. “Brilliant Noise” teases out an obscure aesthetic connection between celestial bodies and human ones, one that you’d be hard pressed to find conveyed elsewhere.
For Semiconductor, some worlds are bigger than others. Worlds in Flux explores micro and macro-environments, some rooted in reality and some completely synthetic, making the familiar seem fascinating and the fantastic seem familiar. Where “Brilliant Noise” takes a close-up look at something gigantic, pieces like “The Sounds of Microclimates” examine the infinitesimally small, with what sounds like an ultra-sensitive microphone picking up and playing with the subtle noises generated in an average, everyday environment. “All the Time in the World” depicts a few idyllic natural environments with a sheen that makes them seem not quite real. Lights scurry about randomly over their surfaces, and they begin to vibrate in time with the throb of background noise, as if the scenes are a stretched over an oscilloscope. The interplay between audio and visual stimulation is a constant thread in Worlds in Flux, as much in the films and cinema pieces as it is in the videos that Semiconductor have created for various experimental music acts.
The music videos included on the DVD cover the same territory as Semiconductor’s other explorations. The wistful, unsettling ambience of Icelandic act mum’s “Green Grass of Tunnel” is rendered as a massive flock of birds swarming around a mountainous dream-environment. Double Adaptor’s “200 Nanowebbers” sounds like something off of AFX’s Analogue Bubblebath played backwards, and is represented on screen by bug-like objects flitting around, joining together with a mass of whip-like dendrites that in turn grow pulsating, pastel crystalline structures. The camera moves around in an infinite space, surveying the landscape as it is generated. In QT?’s 30 seconds or so of screaming abrasive noise, we see the curves of the static ripping around on a rolling Lego block surface.
The only special feature available on Worlds in Flux is the choice to select numerous multiple soundtracks as accompaniment to “Brilliant Noise” to make for an altered viewing experience. There’s not much information available on the DVD about the original context of the works, but the booklet that it comes with features insightful descriptions into the intents behind the works.
With all the stunning original imagery on Worlds in Flux, the most entrancing meditation presented is probably the least graphically intensive one. In “Do You Think Science…” The film features spliced interviews of space physicists responding to a nebulous question posed by Jarman and Gerhardt. It becomes apparent, as the interviewees mull over the question, that the question they’re being posed is if science can explain everything. These scientists, at the top of their field, respond with a kind of contemplative speculation you’d expect from philosophers and artists. This breaking down of the boundaries between the hard sciences and the fine arts is chillingly profound, and shows that it’s no coincidence that Semiconductor were chosen as artists in residence. Space physicists and avant garde artists like Semiconductor both explore their respective spaces, and on this DVD there’s room for those two worlds to intersect. |
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