We have a big show at the Fabrica Gallery in Brighton showing a 3 screen installation version of Brilliant Noise taking up one whole side of the Gallery.
There will also be our Animate / Channel 4 commission short film Magnetic Movie which is to be aired on Channel Four sometime over the next few weeks. And finally the full length version of Do You Think Science... where we interviewed scientists at the NASA Space Sciences Lab UCB about the unknowable in their lives and work.
The Longest Night. On the evening of the winter solstice, 21st December, we are organising a live event with Goodiepal, Scotch Egg, Antenna Farm and ourselves. There will also be a group jam to our Brilliant Noise installation , a live image performace by us and our Sonic Inc software. Only £3, tickets in advance from Fabrica.
The show will move onto the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol next year and then the SightSonic festival in York.
"Essential viewing if you have any interest in the converging worlds of audio and visual digital art."Kultureflash
"A jam packed DVD from one of the audio-visual world’s most intriguing acts - a must see."Boomkat
"Versatile but always coherent in style and visual options Semiconductor are definitively placed in our personal hall of fame of digital cinematic artists."Neural.it
"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." Popmatters
"There's plenty of seriousness here but Semiconductor never lose touch with their animators funny bones", "My favorite is The Sound of Microclimates, filmed in Paris for a surround sound installation. This is animation as ambiguity - is this cloud really hovering over the building? Why is there an iceberg in the municipal pond? Semiconductor's surly electronic soundtrack suggests a sci-fi distortion of the everyday city, till at dusk the glowing lights of the traffic detach themselves and flock like birds. In a moment of great beauty they swarm across Paris to nestle between skyscrapers, jiggling as if crammed into a discotheque for off duty tail-lights." Clive Bell, The Wire
"Becoming an audio-visual palette-cleanser for the bastion of commercial music seems an odd fate for the work of the first artists-in-residence at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory (Berkeley, CA), but it’s symptomatic of Semiconductor’s continual expansion and ability to transcend confines posed by genre." Liam Arnold Skinny
Included on the DVD are the films:
1. Brilliant Noise
2. The Sound Of Microclimates
3. múm – ‘Green Grass Of Tunnel’
4. Inaudible Cities
5. Strata
6. QT? – ‘qqq’
7. Mini Epochs
8. Sonic Inc. (extracts)
9. Digital Anthrax
10. Earthquake Films
11. Do You Think Science…
12. All The Time In The World
13. Double Adaptor – ‘200 Nanowebbers’
Natural and Unnatural Philosophy
Science, architecture, photography, geology, sculpture, food, travelling, computers, lofi+hifi, technology history, nature, unnatural, contradictions, geography, politics, philosophy, cinema, film, movies, video art, experimenting, fiction, faction, astro / quantum physics, music…and not liking things.
We make art about what we don't know!
Semiconductor is the alias of Brighton-based duo Ruth Jarman and Joe 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 many varied processes of digital animation and the potential of the computer to unite sound and image. What they reveal in the process is a physical world in flux - cities in motion; shifting landscapes and systems in chaos. Central to these works is the role of sound, which becomes synonymous with the image as it creates, controls and deciphers it. Finely crafted digital work is combined with analogue processes that tailor the randomness and errors within computer systems as a co-conspirator. 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.
Highly original and immensely creative, Semiconductor approach each project from a fresh angle, always looking to extend themselves and to break new ground. They have exhibited their work in gallery installations, at festivals and in live / club environments. They have been awarded numerous fellowships, prizes and residencies, notably as recent artists in residence at the NASA Space sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California, the results of which can be seen on 2 films here – ‘Do You Think Science’ – which takes the form of filmed interviews with NASA scientists, and ‘Brilliant Noise’ – an incredible film pieced together from actual footage of the sun’s surface. The latter film includes the option to select from a variety of specially commissioned soundtracks from The Twilight Sad, Max Richter, Our Brother The Native, Antenna Farm, Robert Hampson, Gaeaudjiparl, Christian Vogel, Iris Garrelfs, Ensemble, Thomas Dimuzio, Disinformation and Semiconductor themselves.
Around 2000 Semiconductor started to develop their own audiences through a series of events they curated called E.M.I. (Electro Magnetic Interference), where they brought together electronic musicians and visual artists to collaborate on image and sound based projects, creating a unique platform at this time. In 2001 they released a debut Art DVD, ‘Hi-Fi Rise', a compilation of work by themselves and others that comprised one of the first ever independently produced DVD-Videos/ROMs. They then went on to develop a broad range of audiences by working at the intersection of music and art and through opportunities such as a series of Warp records commissions for their ‘Nesh’ club nights in London; Sound Film performances at international festivals (e.g., Avanto Festival Helsinki, Transmediale Berlin, Images Festival Toronto); international gallery installations (e.g., Venice Biennial, Prague Contemporary Arts Festival, and at the ICA in London); and also through music videos for the likes of Aco, DAT Politics, and FatCat artists, múm and QT? Increasingly recognised as vital and cutting edge practitioners, they have most recently been awarded numerous fellowships, awards and residencies.
FatCat’s involvement with Semiconductor began several years back when the label first moved to Brighton. Already fans of their work, we set them to work on videos for QT? and múm (both included here). Their video for QT?’s 53-second long blipvert, ‘qqq’ was a brilliant, viral burst of animation which MTV used as an ident; whilst their stunning animation for múm‘s ‘Green Grass Of Tunnel’ earned them widespread acclaim and a great deal of exposure across international TV and the web. Since then, Semiconductor have taken part in a number of FatCat festival events, and have remained close.
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.
Video documentation of a performance piece by my friend Nate Kassel who rode around on his bike slapping high-fives to people who were trying to hail taxi cabs in NYC. Enjoy!
You might want to upload some of your own animations to 4mations too. Site is still in beta testing, but they are offering cash prizes for most popular films.
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