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An introduction to the work of Brighton-based digital film/sound duo Semiconductor with an interview by Ben Borthwick and an article by Ken Hollings

LUX is pleased to announce it is now distributing the digital film work of Brighton-based duo Semiconductor. As well as all of their short films, LUX offers a compilation of their recent works plus Semiconductor are available for live performances. Please select a link below to scroll directly to that section, or read through the whole text.

A conversation between Ben Borthwick and Semiconductor | Cross Platform by Ken Hollings from The Wire Magazine June 2003 | Semiconductor biography | Semiconductor filmography | Semiconductor Live performance work

A conversation between Ben Borthwick and Semiconductor

Ruth and Joe, it's a pleasure to talk to you here today! Why do you call yourselves Semiconductor?

This name came about when we first started working with computers, bringing digital and analogue together and realising that the computer always had a certain amount of control over the process and output of the work regardless of our intentions. Initially there was a fight between us and it, over time we relinquished half the responsibility and soemtimes let the computer randomize certain elements. The name Semiconductor was acknowledging this shared responsibility, half conducting the operation. Semiconductor is a chip in computers which processes information.

It would be good to get an overview on your background. How did you meet?

We both studied fine art and had a shared interest in electronic music. At college we were working independently both making large scale installations which would incorporate sound and image. We spent a lot of time and collaborated with electronic musicians who were approaching it in a listening way, as visual artists we started working with sound in a visual way.

What stages of evolution has your practice been through to reach this point?

The development of our work has taken quite a natural course. We’d been working with film + sound and started to combine analogue and digital media. We know we are lucky to have a new medium to explore. We were working with the first generation of software and were able to experiment with the potential of computers as a tool and worked closely with it as possibilities of representation/finding routes between software, and different ways of overcoming the identity it tries to impose on your work. In this way we relate to modernism, exploring a new medium and developing new spatial relationships. With our first Sound Films we didn’t really know what we had made. There were no contemporary genres which we could identify with. We now screen work at multi-media festivals, events installations and screenings. For the last year we have been touring live work developed as live film and sound, where we are trying to challenge the dependence that a lot of people lend to real-time software by programming our own environments. Since spending time in Venice to produce our recent installation Mini-Epochs Series, we discovered the freedom that a residency gives you and will be spending some of 2004 at a residency in Paris.

What is the Semiconductor division of labour - who does what?
The initial idea for a piece of work sets up the role of who will be the director for the duration of production and then we bounce ideas off of one another as we work. In general we both do everything but take turns on projects and let each other take control. Our own personal focuses initially were based on Joe developing the sonic experimental ideas and Ruth being concerned with architecture/landscape and representation but those distinctions have become unimportant as we now both share all our ideas and work.

You are able to 'pass' between film and music contexts very easily. The sound element is strong enough to stand alone in a music context and the visuals in a film context. Does this mean you are fully embraced by both contexts or do you have an ambivalent relationship to both?

We are quite unusual in that we make both sound and image whether for films or our live sound film works. Usually for most film makers one medium takes a back seat or film makers just get someone else to make/ chose the soundtrack. The actual flow of swapping between the sound and image production is not an easy transition for us either. The process of working in each sense has very different responses in our brains and it takes time to change focus, hopefully becoming easier as we progress. We do not automate much in our work so that we don’t really use sequencers or ready made effects, which is how many electronic musicians and VJs produce work and why it often looks and sounds very similar.

We often feel like we’re working with sound in a visual way by the nature of how we manipulate it. Not seeing it as a musical score or notes in a structure but as a soundscape that is synonymous with landscapes. The actual methods we use are also visually driven as by working in the computer with waveforms on the screen it becomes almost sculptural. The timeline in the film and sound editing program are a way of seeing and shaping media in time itself.

A number of your works analyse the formal processes of sound/film production, by which I mean that the sound determines the image which determines the sound, etc. I am thinking of Puffed Rice, A-Z of Noise or Yes U R Right. Do you always start with one element (ie. Sound OR image) which determines the other?

Our work always has a sight to sound/ sound to sight concept behind it. In our formal process based films the relationship of the senses are central to the work and are uniquely explored through technology and computers. It is important to us for the relationship between image and sound to transcend mere synchronised choreography and to actually physically tie the senses. This is possible within the computer as sound and film are both treated just data where the same processes can be used to develop formal ideas.

A to Z of Noise demonstrates that similar concepts are being employed to process each type of media, in this instance ‘cleaning’ the media and making it more uniform which in fact has the opposite result. Noise Reduction is often used to clean both sound and image but what happens if you only have noise as sound and image? The results of A to Z of Noise is as we poetically describe, “A sound recording of the 20th century in 60 seconds”. Puffedrice is actually a sound sculpture that has been converted into images of its own data within the computer, frame by frame, ”…Snap,crackle,pop…”, and Yes You Are Right! is the result of a misplaced cable transforming the sound into image through analogue misappropriation.

You have different animation styles that break down into three loose groupings: first, the formalist, process-based approach I refer to above; second, the 3-d cut outs, built objects or found images like photographs in films like Retropolis or Migration; finally, computer generated animations in works like Inaudible Cities or Linear. Do you continue to work with all these approaches or do these styles delineate different moments in your history?

In some respects they do lineate moments within our history but we see less distinction between the works ourselves. The same ideas of sound controlling the image and structures representing information constructs whether they are 2d or 3d work are consistent throughout. They all have an abstract relationship to image where soundtrack creates a narrative like in music and where language based narrative is irrelevant. Each of our films so far at least has quite a different look, feel and concept behind it which is either a sign of our own undeveloped identity or the continuing breadth of our interests. We are yet to know ourselves.

I am very interested in the relationships you set up between sound, space and architecture. What are your views about these relationships in reality and these relationships in your films?

The kind of music and sound we like and listen too is often very spatially orientated. Setting up structures that exist outside of formal musical ideas where a more tactile terrain of space and structure exists. The topologies of sound and image can be manipulated in a very sculptural way but unlike sculpture the element of time keeps everything moving. The notion of the city is often a recurrent theme in our work as we see a geographical metamorphosis of urban landscapes being animated over time. Cities and their elements are impermanent structures but in our everyday lives we often forget to see them this way. Our recent installation works from the Venice Biennial explored these ideas further and took on the many layers of scale and time that shift through our imaginations within cities and their architecture.

Vibration is a theme that runs through a number of your films. In Linear or Earthquake Films it is vibration in extremis where particular frequencies wreak havoc on architecture and the built environment. It is almost as if vibration is the unconscious of architecture, a natural force with the power to rupture surfaces and destabilises structures - earthquakes as the return of the repressed! Is the earthquake a metaphor that gives you insight into architecture and sound?

The synopsis for earthquake films is, “Songlines sung by an earthquake”. The relationship of the constant movement in all things and sound waves are explored in these two films in a more dramatic way. Linear is concerned with the Superstring theory where the universe is made up of vibrating strings similar to the vibrations of sound. Again it is about the animation of landscape over time or at a microscopic level where matter is seething with movement.

Why are there no people in your films?

We create pieces which are first person experiences whether they are synasthetic or journeys through sonic lands.

You also do commercial work. How do you approach it and are there compromises involved? And if you became self-sufficient from your films would you continue to make music videos, etc., or would you focus exclusively on your own work?

We have been more than lucky to have been able to make promos for musicians we like very much, not only that but we have almost total freedom in what we do. Two of our Fat Cat Records promos, (www.fat-cat.co.uk), are to be included in the Lux archives. Mum ‘Green Grass of Tunnel’ and QT’qqq’. The Mum promo is very easy going compared to most of our works. It is a cg nature film based on the lighthouse where they produced the album in Iceland. QT ‘qqq’ is a 50 second war film with a soundtrack by a Japanese noise musician.

For the moment at least we have had to compromise very little and the works, being far more finished and polished, push us to develop other interests that our art based works might not explore. Because of this we will always see making music videos as more of a collaboration and are always interested in exploring these relationships and what they can bring to our work and vice versa.

Ben Borthwick is Assistant Curator at Tate Modern. He has written extensively on the relationship between sound and visual art and is a regular contributor to The Wire (including Dec 2003 cover story with Carsten Nicolai).

(This article was published in issue 232 of The Wire magazine, June 2003) reproduced with thanks to Ken Hollings and The Wire magazine www.thewire.co.uk

Cross Platform
Sound in other media. This month: Ken Hollings finds virtual cities, digital earthquakes and viral ruins in the shattering audiovisuals of Semiconductor.

When they perform live, there's nothing to see. Just two figures hunched over laptops in darkness, arms occasionally reaching through the field of light cast by a carefully positioned lamp. Nobody's really paying much attention to Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, the shadowy duo behind Semiconductor's audiovisual assaults upon human consciousness. Over the past four years, from their hideaway in Brighton on England's south coast, they have been creating a stream of sound films, computer-animated music videos and multimedia happenings that explore the deep new terrain opening up in the cracks between the visual and the auditory, the abstract and the figurative, the spontaneous and the pre programmed. On screen, an electrical storm rages in slabs of the dark sky between tower blocks. Cities of gigantic proportions come apart, reassembling themselves according to a disturbing logic that only they seem to understand. Cellular entities battle each other in a dazzling sub molecular domain. Dimensions heave and shift. All sense of scale and stability has long since disappeared. Semiconductor is the brand name for digital noise and computer anarchy.

"We spend a lot of time removing default settings in the computer which try to keep things 'clean' or 'realistic' and alternatively try to find approaches which may disrupt the way software has been trained to present information," Jarman and Gerhardt explain. "We need to steer it rather than be steered by it. The computer is considered to lack soul, but our demands require it to overcome this."

Advances in the real-time processing of audiovisual data not only mean that old hierarchical relationships between music and moving imagery are being dismantled, but new hybrid forms are also coming into being. The line between abstraction and representation is rapidly becoming blurred. Reflecting electronic music's plunge into digital noise and sample degradation, Semiconductor have proposed the notion of "Artificial Expressionism", an appropriately functional term for a historically messy territory. "It appears as a contradiction," they concede, "yet it's actually suggesting something playful. It informs a pledge between the artist and the computer. The 'artificial' is representing something very rigid which exists as a series of rules and made up of zeroes and' ones. By bringing expression to this, which is the human element, we are introducing a form of chaos which disrupts any predetermined outcome."

The perfect expression of this creative chaos lies in the tensions the duo chart between the self-replicating grandeur of urban architecture and the forces of nature activated in storms and earthquakes. "They set a scale, a human scale and a point of reference. Earthquakes and natural disasters are reminders of our place in our constructed environments and of the bigger picture. We use them as animation tools to deconstruct and mess things up. They are tools, in the same way computers are to us." From the dancing buildings in Earthquake Films, giving visual form to songlines 'sung' into being by an earthquake, to the electrical meltdown of Retropolis and somber flickering of Inaudible Cities: Part 1, Semiconductor trace the outline of structures in a state of flux, and mark the effect of sound travelling through the visual order of things.

In 2001 Semiconductor took the step of releasing eight of their sound films on the Hi-Fi Rise: Sonic Cities From Another Timeline DVD, one of the first ever independently released DVD-ROMs. The interface for accessing the ROM presented the film choices within an architectural arena awaiting exploration. "linear" shows the subatomic vibrations of a city made up of tiny resonating wires; "New Antics" captures simple life forms in action; while "Migration" offers a voyage through a constantly evolving landscape. Also included is their sense-shredding 60 second "sound recording of the 20th century", "A-Z of Noise".

"With this piece we started with a single black frame of video and added a filter that cleans and sharpens the image each second for the one-minute duration, similarly with the audio, starting off with a one second sound clip of noise and using a noise reduction process to sterilize the information. So as each medium of sight and sound had a digital cleansing process applied to them It brought out qualities and matter that wasn't there before and letting the computer reveal something very true to itself but directed by us. This introduced a nice contradiction, trying to clean pure noise, where noise is all the unwanted information we experience." Created in 1999 and lexically flipping Russolo's 1913 Futurist tract The Art Of Noises, its scrambled digital graininess expresses, as Semiconductor explain it, "a growing paranoia of civilization imploding or even exploding, and that this was to be longed for, not feared" . Also included on the DVD is a selection of work by other artists working in the same area of sound film and music video, including People Like Us and Yvette Klein. Semiconductor have worked with a number of musicians and labels, most notably creating music videos for Fat Cat Records and 'DAT Politics, creating sleeve art for innovative Mikrofisch offshoot Supremat, and becoming resident visual artists for Warp's recent Nesh club nights in London.

"Not only does this allow us to develop our skills and see new potentials in our relationship with the computer, but we get to form work and take risks we wouldn't necessarily do in our own work. Fat Cat In particular have a very trusting approach towards their artists, and their reputation proves this pays off. You don't often meet producers who generously give you total freedom, Fat Cat also lends us their audience, giving our work a different context;"

Standouts have included the dreamy video narrative for "Green Grass Of Tunnel" by Iceland's Mum, transforming the lighthouse and valley where the group used to live into a darkly protean version of Moomin Valley, and QT-Digital Anthrax, a delirious pixel world where viruses battle it out for the survival of the fittest, accompanied by QT's 56 second composition "qqq". The duo has also been picked to set up a site specific installation with sound animations to accompany work by sculptor Richard Wentworth at Venice Biennale's Zenobio Pavilion, opening this month.

Digital Anthrax, which now forms part of their: live audiovisual set, points towards a regime in which animated forms hurl themselves, like' abstract cartoon characters, into real-time conflict. "We program our own 3D environments which we navigate and have audio triggers synced with animations. The alternative Is to fall for digital clichés or use real-time programs which tend to control the output." Expectations are dislocated; senses re-engaged. " Noise is unwanted sensory information," Semiconductor remark in relation to their live work. "In the world of computers everything is clean, so for humans to live comfortably they need to add some noise. The idea of noise is both visual and audible. We see a parallel of senses, not a joining of two senses, but [treating them as] the same thing. Feels like computer anarchy. Computers can only simulate it. "
Ken Hollings

Semiconductor: biography
Semiconductor are artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt. They make films out of sound using abstract landscapes and architecture as, a means to describe aural and visual interpretations of the world. Finely crafted digital work is combined with analogue processes that tailor the randomness and errors within computer systems as co-conductor. Their music can be described as a contradiction where 'musique concrete' becomes simultaneously hypnotic and violent, minimal and maximal. Becoming the very fabric of the film, and revealing new discoveries in spatial acoustics, these sound-scapes are a playground for imaginary environments and impossible modernist architecture.

Their work has become a regular feature at international short film festivals, multimedia festivals and is gaining a reputation amongst international art audiences through exhibitions at galleries and institutes worldwide.
In 2001 they released a debut DVD ‘Hi-Fi Rise: Sonic cities from another timeline’ to promote their unique genre of sound-film work, one of the first ever independently produced DVD-Videos/ROMs.

Their current live performance has been winning awards and recognition internationally and includes Inaudible Cities: Part One, the first in a series of short films where cities are made of and controlled by sound.

There is a current sense that the hierarchy of 'digital visual art versus electronic music' is being dismantled. Artists and musicians alike are transcending the language of image and sound as these territories begin to draw from the same new technologies. This cross-over of practice and technique is evolving in the form of short films and videos where data flow and the interpretation of information is explored formally and representationally.

(Artificial Expressionism, Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, Sonar 2002)

Semiconductor's work is at the forefront of an emergent, hybridised practice that blurs the lines between sound and image and confounds the viewer/listener as they attempt to determine the etymology of the work. "We have sought to physically tie the senses of sight and sound in an attempt to transcend their difference and possibly find a place where they have no distinction." Sound cinema is one tecurrently used to describe this process though it seems like a weak articulation of an evolving practice that refuses such neat categorisation. Inaudible Cities, part-commissioned by Lighthouse, is a visual/aural architecture where the audience become the occupants of a space that is unfamiliar yet feels like home.

(Evelyn Wilson Director of Lighthouse: Brighton: UK)

www.semiconductorfilms.org

Filmography (all films available from LUX)

Semiconductor compilation Programme
56 mins, 1999-2002. 12 Films

A-Z Of Noise
(1:10) April 1999
A sound recording of the 20th century played in 60 seconds.

Dat Politics
(4:30) February 2000
Audio: Dat Politics
© Skipp Records 2000
The chunkiest world ever built by sound. Genesis destroyed on an assembly line of coded typography.

Earthquake Films
(10:00) July 2000
Songlines sung by an earthquake.

Inaudible Cities : Part 1
(10:00) June 2002
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.

Linear
(5:30) 2001
A C.G.I. documentary about a Hi-Fi Rise somewhere in the 21st Century. Portraying the story of T.O.E. String, a confused citizen within a quaking urban universe.

Migration
(4:44) April 1999
A voyage through a constantly evolving landscape.

Múm – Green Grass Of Tunnel
(4:30) May 2002
Audio: Múm
© 2002 Fat-Cat Records
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.

New Antics
(4:15) November 2000
Simple life forms.

Puffed Rice
(2:30) February 2000
The universal language of rice crispies in black and white.

QT - Digital Anthrax
(0:56) 2001
Audio: QT ‘qqq’
© Fat Cat Records
Digital life is born into a pixel world where viruses battle it out for the survival of the fittest.

Retropolis
(4:48) April 1999
Retropolis is a city where the dust never settles and the last few light bulbs are fighting for survival. Transforming London into a modern Sci-Fi landscape, a fast moving journey takes us through destruction and chaos fuelled by an electrically charged soundtrack.

Yes You Are Right!
(1:16) April 1999
A direct aural assault on the retina

Semiconductor: Live Performance Work
Total Performance duration: 25 minutes
Our live performance currently is three live films. We perform these in different ways: we play live sound to one, live sound and image and finally live image. We are trying to challenge the way that live film exists, not depending on existing software, which tends to homogenise an artists output, but by programming our own 3d worlds. We have developed real-time 3d environments to control movement and time. Within these worlds sounds are triggered and landscapes are born. We perform from two laptop computers. We are in the process of developing new live work.

Inaudible Cities: Part One (10:00) June 2002
Inaudible Cities: Part One is the first in a series of short films by Semiconductor 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 software programme which listens to the various parts of the soundtrack and constructs the animated environments.

Strata (0900) June 2002
Strata, samples the art of picture-making by presenting constructed views of mixed-up sound-scapes. Invaded by sonic simulations, this real-time interactive 3D world seeks to fulfil the hopes and dreams of landscape as natural phenomena.

Digital Anthrax (5:00) November 2002
Digital Anthrax is a dual player interface. Artificial lifeforms evolve throughout the exploration of real-time 3-D terrains. Semiconductor programmed a real-time Sound Film where it’s the survival of the fittest.

Earthquake Films (10:00) June 2000
Songlines sung by an earthquake.

This current performance has been winning awards and recognition internationally.
Recent performances include:
Ruido Digital: Belo Horizonte: Brazil 2003
The Lux Open: London 2003
Fat-Cat Records Event: Hasselt: Belgium 2003
Netmage: Bologna: Italy 2003
Hospital Festival: Brighton 2002
Avanto festival: Helsinki: Finland 2002