09 SPOTLIGHT: SEMICONDUCTOR
Semiconductor: Parting the Waves, 2017
SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN FACTOR
Brighton-based duo Semiconductor – Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt – have collaborated for over two decades on artworks engaging with scientific data. They explore the material nature of our physical world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology. Typically, Semiconductor carry out intensive research in science laboratories to identify data from which they can generate an audio-visual experience of the aesthetic sublime. For example, in the five-channel computer-generated animation Earthworks (2016), seismic data converted into sound is employed to create an immersive experience of the phenomena of landscape formation - through the animation of the modelling techniques that are used to study it. That points up the subjective, human element in scientific findings, as do the two works we discuss in detail below. For HALO(2018), Semiconductor developed custom-made mechanical sound apparatus to create an immersive experience of matter formation in the early universe. The moving image installation Parting the Waves (2017) takes the visual language and method of quantum simulations as a framework for exploring how science describes and attempts to harness the quantum realm. ‘Through making visible the tools and materials used by scientists’, say Jarman and Gerhardt, ‘we observe the work of the observers, drawing attention to the ways in which science mediates our experiences of nature.’
How did you come to be ‘Semiconductor’?
We were already collaborating when we graduated and started working with computers in 1999. The name refers to how semiconductors lie behind a computer’s ability to process information. But more than that, it felt when we worked with particular software as if it was trying to put its own signature on the artwork, so we played around with giving the computer specific responsibilities, like choosing the colour – we were only ‘semi-conducting’ the outcome!
What has inspired your particular combination of science and art?
Our initial interest was in nature. That led us to wonder about what’s happening in the world beyond the limits of our perception, and that turned us towards science and technology. Originally we were making digital art, looking how our reality was increasingly seen through a digital lens; but then started to spend time in science laboratories, and to think more about the philosophies of science. At NASA in Berkeley we met solar physicist Janet Lhumann, who emphasised that ‘science is just a human invention’, and we felt that was a license to question its processes. Science always emerges from subjective points of view, even though it is presented as objective. Our reality is humanistic, so we try to place the viewer so as to allow them to recreate that subjective experience.
What are the creative, technical, and scientific processes involved in HALO?
HALO was conceived as an experiential reworking of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, its experiments, and its data sets. ATLAS uses multiple layers of different technologies to record sub-atomic particles as they come out of a central collision point. We became interested in the tracks that were left behind in one particular instrument – the Transition Radiation Tracker – which showed all the particles -, bending and twisting around the magnetic fields caused by the large magnets within the experiment. The tracker is made up of lots of wires inside a chamber of neon gas, and we imagined these wires being played like an instrument by the particles, with us positioned within, observing the particles moving about playing the wires and the hammers.
We used a particular type of data – minimum bias data – because it’s as close as possible to the natural form of the event itself. We’re always thinking of the raw signal and how that signal gets translated. HALO is very much thinking about: OK, we have these data points, what kind of experience do we get from them, what happens if we play them at a particular speed? Each collision in ATLAS occurs at close to the speed of light: we re-animated 60 of these, slowing time down immeasurably to reveal time in the ordinarily static data. That data is animated so that waves and particles are emerging all around the viewer to produce a composition of sound and space. It was complex to construct, and the first time we’d made an artwork where we couldn’t experience it until it was finally installed!
Scientists often describe the particle collisions occurring at CERN as recreating conditions thought to have existed in our universe shortly after the Big Bang: here we made an immersive experience of matter formation in the early universe that’s framed through the technological and scientific devices that are developed to study it. Viewers are invited to consider the philosophical problems of our mediated understandings of science and of nature, while submitting themselves completely to their technological sublime.
HALO, Semiconductor, Art Basel, 2018. Filmed by: Semiconductor + Glasshopper
How much of the science does the viewer need to understand?
Very little! Of course there are layers, but we’re always keen for people to experience the work without knowing a lot in advance. We remove the scientific context from the data so it becomes something in its own right - but all the same, when you look at the visual entity you get a sense that there’s nature in there somewhere. Yet there’s also this structure to how it’s laid out that suggests the technology produced through man’s hands, so you get a sense of these two things playing off each other. We do show a ‘making of’ film with HALO to explain more, but we always position it in the exhibition lay-out to provide learning after the experience.
How did Parting the Waves (2017) come about?
That stemmed from an event in Amsterdam that brought together artists and scientists in an unusual way – the scientists had to stand up and give presentations, and the artists chose who they’d like to work with. We were attracted to quantum theorists and experimentalists, and they were part of a network which led to us visiting the universities of Strathclyde, Oxford and Turku, Finland. We ended up focusing in on the mathematical formulas through which physicists try to describe quantum space – including how particles may exist some way apart, yet still influence each other. We were interested in the idea of model making: scientists often tell us that in nature, everything happens all at once, but all we can do as humans trying to understand it is to break it up into components which can be modelled. Just so, quantum simulations are approximations of nature that are modelled and then compared to other models, to gradually build up a picture of the phenomena being studied.
We took as a starting point undulating wave forms which are produced using a quantum computer: realised as three co-ordinate graphs, they present mathematical computations of particle interactions – in a quantum system – being affected by distance, over time. We started with the sound of those waves, and used the same data to generate and animate visual waveforms. We selected specific frequencies which the scientists are interested in which then create harmonies and dissonances, to play with notions of phasing, shifting and interactions in a quantum system. As the tones shift, disturbing the system, so it responds visually, producing varying degrees of amplitude, wavelength and frequency which result in complex interference patterns. The colours are representative of the coding system scientists use, to identify specific parameters or patterns when model making.
What are you working on currently?
We are hoping to tour HALO beyond the two venues already scheduled. We’re working with scientists at University of Dundee who are collecting light from deep space and using it to study how planets are formed – the resulting artworks are due to be exhibited later this year as part of the NEoN Digital Arts festival in Dundee. We’re also working on a large kinetic sculpture, which will be announced soon; and are developing a real-time animation for an architectural intervention.
Where can we experience your work?
Upcoming Semiconductor shows include:
HALO’s UK premiere at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA), University of Sussex, Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival 19 May – 4 June
HALO exhibition presented by John Hansard Gallery at MAST Mayflower Studios, Southampton, 21-30 June
Cosmos District, Place du Château, Strasbourg France. Group Show exhibiting Catching the Light, 3-13 June 2021.
Bienal de la Ciencia, Cosmocaixa, Barcelona. Group Show exhibiting Through the AEgIS, 8 – 13 June 2021.
Nemo Festival, 104-Paris, France: Group show exhibiting, Earthworks, 20Hz and Where Shapes Come From, October 2021 – January 2022.
University Library KU Leuven, Belgium. Group show exhibiting HALO 0.1 / 0.2 / 0.3. 22 October 2021 – 16 January 2022.
For more about these and other projects, please visit the Semiconductor website
All images and video shown courtesy of © 2021 Semiconductor