Semiconductor is the artist duo of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Their work — recognized via awards and fellowships from Gulbenkian Galapagos, Smithsonian Artists Research, and NASA — has ranged from Crystallised’s rendering/translation of the sounds of ice crystal growth into visual animations of crystal birth (revealing how auditory order seeds visual order in the process) to to the conceptually simple and brilliant Heliocentric (in which the Sun stays fixed in the sky and the landscape tilts and falls around it) to the sound-wave distorted photographic landscapes of Earth Moves. There are many, many more, spanning over a decade’s worth of effort. And the idea through many of Semiconductor’s pieces remains revelation: bringing the usually unseen forces and processes and orders of the natural world into the realm of human perception.The duo’s recent 20 HZ, created for Arts Santa Monica’s Invisible Fields exhibition in Barcelona, takes as its source radio waves from a upper-atmosphere geo-magnetic storm, boosts them into an audible frequency, and interprets them into the visualization above, a profoundly strange and hypnotic world of mutating patterns, marching waves, and spontaneous form. Watch it above. Earlier this week I asked the pair a few questions.I wonder if you can talk a bit about the element of discovery in making something like this. You’re starting with fairly raw data and interpreting it like so: what is the culling/editing process like? Were you surprised by the shapes and sounds 20 Hz wound up with?Although the structure and animation is driven by the data the aesthetics aren't something that's inherent in it but exists through the creative decisions we make. It's a very sculptural process where we have an idea of how we want something to work and then use the data to form this. In this case we wanted it to suggest scientific imaging, something you might associate with perhaps electro imaging but that is also unfamiliar at the same time. We wanted to explore waveforms but in a way that hasn't been represented before.There's a lot of trial and error developing the combination of techniques and aesthetics before you get to something which is the eureka moment. The sounds are fantastic. We worked directly with the scientist who was already turning his data into audio. We had previously worked with VLF data of the magnetosphere, which is what this is too but it's looking at a very different wavelength so it sounds quite different. Once you understand what the data is capturing it becomes incredibly tangible and seems to make sense, whether that's because we are making associations or it really can be related to our experiences of the everyday, it's difficult to say, but this is what we like about working in this way, making something tangible which exists beyond our sensory perceptions.A few weeks ago, I posted an audio file of radio wave emmisions from Saturn and a couple of people responding immediately that it sounded like something that might’ve come from a modern drone/noise artist and I had to agree. Likewise, I hear this and think it honestly sounds better than 80-percent of modern noise music, more thoughtful and composed. Do you think there’s insight to be gleaned into the human process of creation-via-electronics from interpretations like this?When we turn the data into sound we are, of course, doing it in a way that we can perceive as humans, using our paramaters as it were, so it naturally becomes familiar to us in some way. In the data, we as humans are looking for meaning, not just scientific but when we hear the data as sound we are naturally trying to make sense of it and apply some sort of meaning to the matter even if we don't really understand as a laymen what it is. These things combined end up with sort of anthropomorphism, where we're applying our experiences and physical limitations onto the sound that is created through the desire to understand it in some way. It is not surprising then that we can relate it to modern drone or noise music.Can you talk a bit about the interpretation process with this? The Saturn thing was “just” a shifting of frequencies to an audible range.This data already existed as a waverform it was shifted it from very low hertz to bring it into the audible range, exactly like the Saturn data.What do you think interpretting natural phenomenon like this—and bringing it into the world of galleries and art—can reveal about those phenomenon? Or what do you hope it can?For us it's about exploring the physical world and our experiences of it. When we work with matter beyond our limited perceptions in this way, we want to create first-person experiences that allow you to witness something for the first time, a kind of technological sublime. We want to re-think our relationship with the physical world and how mans tools can extend this.Placing it in the art gallery gives us a clear context for presenting the work, and raises questions about its validity as a mechanism for scientific interpretation.Do you have a new data source you’re interested in interpreting in the future? Or already are? When you’re looking through science news or maybe just out and out in the world, do you ever think about something and wonder what it might sound like?We've always dabbled with the inaudible in the world around us — this normally develops from an interest in the physical material and how we can explore it. Sometimes we start with the sound or sometimes the image, but one normally goes on to create or control the other through an interest in how these things co-exist rather than trying to create a narrative or human connection to these things. We often find ourselves in various science labs and these provide us with inspiration, our most recent residency was at the mineral sciences laboratory of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, we have new work in the pipeline that has come out of hanging out with mineralogists there which were very excited about.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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20 HZ, Semiconductor
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from Earth Moves, 2006
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