Out of the Light - Semiconductor in Paris

 

Out of The Light - Semiconductor at Le Cube Issy-les Moulineaux 5th October 2008-17th January 2009

Le Cube is the first Arts Centre in the Paris Region and in France dedicated to New Media and the Digital Arts. Situated in Issy-les-Moulineaux in the South West suburbs of Paris and only half an hour  from the city centre, the centre is housed in a purpose built building. The Cube’s  remit is to offer production, diffusion and education in digital and electronic multi-media to the local community. It is well-equipped and the programme includes workshops, seminars, concerts & performances, an outdoor festival and artists residencies.

Semiconductor is a British duo formed in 1997 by artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Their work explores the physical world in flux; cities in movement, changing landscapes, systems in chaos, a world of protons, magnetic fields and seismic reverberations. Combining computer generated imagery with hand drawn and filmed sequences, their work is both scientific and poetic. They are not overwhelmed by scientific information or data, they have found how to play with it, control it and use it either reverently or irreverently for its aesthetic and evocative qualities. Their images leave us fascinated with the world around us and whether real or constructed, broaden the limits of our perception.

For their exhibition Out of The Light Semiconductor presented six works made between 2005 and 2008 and an installation presented for the first time. The six works on monitors gave an overview of their work to date. Set up like a videotheque with the monitors housed in individual cases, seats in front of the screens and individual headphones, this presentation gave an intimate and documentary feel to the viewing process. 

The representation of invisible magnetic fields and radio activity is gaining ground in art & design and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s books Hertzian Tales: electric products, aesthetic experience and critical design and Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects add a rich, playful and conceptual contribution to the genre as does Magnetic Movie from 2007 (4′47). A Channel 4 ‘Animated Projects’ commission in collaboration with the Arts Council of England, it presents one of the Space Sciences Laboratories in the University of California, Berkley. A voice off describes the movement and cause of magnetic fields, brightly coloured lines describing these magnetic frequencies oscillate throughout the laboratory, flowing through corridors, vibrating in tubes, increasingly taking over more and more space. Its as if Semiconductor are imagining and visualising the secret life of these magnetic fields. 

In 200_Nanowebbers 2005 (2′49), hand drawn and vectorised molecules and crystal structures are generated and controlled by the sound of Double Adapters’ ‘Osaka Recordings’. The coloured prisms and pyramidal shapes grow and change form, evoking glass pyramids, cut diamonds and crystals in shades of blue, green, yellow and purple. Hand drawn lines like barbed or electric wires with particle formations growing around them evoke an idea of natural organic growth and chemical crystalline structures isolated in virtual space.

Brilliant Noise, 2006, (5′56), shown here on a monitor was presented in Paris in October 2008 as part of La Nuit Blanche (meaning an all-nighter). La Nuit Blanche takes place each year and is an evening of large and small installations, concerts and performances throughout Paris from 7pm to 7am.  Museums  open their doors all night and it is nor rare to find long queues for events at two in the morning. The installations are large and impressive and last year all the railway stations in Paris had major art works for the night. Semiconductor showed Brilliant Noise in the large entrance hall to St. Lazare Station. On a large scale screen black and white grainy  images of spectral explosions and what looked like rivers of silver flowing fluids shone in the dark, luminous rays that made you wonder what kind of strange landscape you were looking at. They resembled photograms or photo-sensitive material exposed to light. They were in fact from NASA’s archives, satellite images of solar winds from radio and electromagnetic fields. The layers of sound from radio frequencies accentuated the galactic supernova sensation of these images which left you in awe at the aesthetic quality of energy and radiation. Brilliant Noise was also shown in Glasgow in November 2007 as part of Radiance: Glasgow’s Festival of Light, in a programme of site-specific works in abandoned locations in the Merchant City, curated by Street Level.

The installation Out of the Light, 2008, is Semiconductor’s most recent  work, a co-production with Arcadi (Action Régionale pour la Création Artistique et la Diffusion en Ile-de-France). A cube was constructed in a rather reduced and crowded space, disappointing from the outside, but once inside you forgot about the limits of the space and were looking down on a large rectangular surface with images moving across it. There was something magical about it, like a camera obscura where scenes of people walking outside in the street are magically played out in front of you. A series of short sequences  filmed and computer generated, real and artificial, poetic and scientific.

The movement of light and shadow; through a window, through trees, on strangely constructed settlements, on artificial looking rocks. The changing position of the sun and the resulting shadows at times real and at times artificially created, giving us the sense of time passing and the perpetual cyclical movement of the earth. The sound as in all of Semiconductor’s work plays an essential role. It controls and adds interpretation, it helps us understand what we’re looking at. In Out of the Light we hear the distant sound of birds or of wind helping us situate the abstract images in Nature. The sound of an electronic zoom on a telescopic lens indicates not only that we are looking through a telescopic device but that it is changing the scale. The sun trembles and shifts in the frame, the close-up is so great that its almost as if the telescopic camera is hand-held and quivering, causing hand shake.

Whether real or false, whether using archive imagery or computer-generated simulations of scientific data, phenomenon and spectrums, making the invisible visible is a way of understanding the world. The spectator wants to believe in the authenticity of what he or she sees “because men cannot understand neither form nor substance if it doesn’t resemble anything in their world. That is why I have to tell them parables to bring them the comparisons and the images they are missing.”1

Louise Crawford

1. Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls.

Louise Crawford is an artist and writer based in Paris.

February 22nd, 2009