Semiconductor Articles and Texts

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 60second "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. "

Website: www.semiconductorfilms.com

This article was published in The Wire issue 232 June 2003

Kathy Battista and Brandon Labelle.

Absolut Generations Essay

http://absolut.com/

Absolut Generations Catalogue essay

Generative Cities: Wentworth and Semiconductor

By Kathy Battista and Brandon Labelle

The city is both backdrop and stage set for an elaborate productions namely, the performance of everyday life. The comings and goings, of friends and strangers, intertwined and commingling in conflicting flows, formed and informed by the appearance and disappearance of centres and margins, markings and their erasure, all connote the city as theatrical space. For urban theorists such as Richard Sennett, such space is always slightly ahead of our ability to understand and read its signs. The city is both corporeal and phantasmic, a site for the political articulation of ideology and the imaginary or ghostly passing of voices. (1)

British artist Richard Wentworth revels in the performance of everyday life. For twenty years he has walked the length of the Caledonion Road, close to his home in London, acting as anthropologist, explorer, and flaneur. His photographs and installations document urban banalities that seem abnormal or out of place: a battered jug resting on the end of on iron fence, a giant can of peas holding a door open, a pair of rubber gloves wedged into a small opening in a wall . As an artist Wentworth is concerned with urban detritus and the architecture that supports it. Avoiding the stylish minimalism of some of his generation, Wentworth's interest instead lies in the precarious, crumbling, yet resistant fabric of the city - where the city reveals its own 'geo-graphics'.

Italo Calvino writes of the city that we only know when we are slaves to it: "The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that ... the treacherous city possesses. '(2)

The invisible city thus makes itself apparent in a performative desire - it overwhelms, terrorises, and excites at one in the same instant. It is this city that Wentworth knows. In this increasingly globalised and sterilised age, London delivers up the debris of transformation in the derelict and forgotten, the gentrified and dilapidated. Wentworth attempts to recall, to re-figure, the layers of the city and the history embedded in the streets, windows, and doors that are the subject of his work. He understands the city in flux, its inhabitants powerless to fight against its tide.

Semiconductor's films share with Wentworth's photographs on engagement with the landscape of cities, finding inspiration in the fabric of the built - and unbuilt - environment. Their work features abstracted cities morphing, multiplying, and revolving, or being violently shattered to their core. High-rise buildings evolve from their foundations and replicate themselves, landscapes, swell and retract, architecture resonates or topples like a house of cards. Their films and animations integrate digital and analogue processes, ranging from customized computer software in Inaudible Cities (2002) to found photographs and handmade cut outs resembling Halstenwall (3) in Retropolis (1999). Describing their work as "making films out of sound", Semiconductor bridge the disciplined of visual arts, film; and music. Where Wentworth uses the city's props and their various juxtapositions to describe its inherent fluidity, Semiconductor construct their metropolis from abstract sounds. Their handmade sets and found photographs parallel Wentworth's practice, but their digital processes reflect a new generation of media finding its way into contemporary art.

While Semiconductor's multi-media work corresponds with Wentworth's across generations, their distinctive approaches reveal alternative viewpoints on our on life and how art may operate to image such life. These differences are represented in their respective ABSOLUT portraits. In ABSOLUT Wentworth the artist supports the signature bottle on a first edition of Modern English Usage which, in turn is supported by a rectangular mirror. The celebrated reference book finds its text reversed as is the rear view of the bottles famous script. 'Leonardo was here', says the photograph. ABSOLUT WENTWORTH is typical of the artist's photographic tracking of found objects, that have become signs half-erased or smudged by history, but which signal a semiotic jouissance (following Roland Barthes, Wentworth takes pleasure in the drift of meaning) that accentuates the tiny fractures and fissures of urban life. Photography, for Wentworth is a roving eye parallel to the artist's pedestrian viewpoint - Wentworth is on the street, up-close and inside the fugitive flow of the city.

Such perspective shifts in Semiconductor's work, as seen in their ABSOLUT portrait. The static photograph is animated in the pixilated virtuality of a digital audio-vision where the computer functions as a co-conspirator. Merging electronic music with the visual arts , Semiconductor's urban space is rendered fantastic - hyper-real, full of digital noise, and infused with computer-generated life. ABSOLUT SEMICONDUCTOR is an animated digital landscape, where bottles resemble buildings that suggest an urban fabric. The sound of the ABSOLUT bottles clanging together creates on unstable environment, like fault lines shifting during an earthquake. Semiconductor constructs the city as cinematic fantasy, a 'sonic city', full of vibration; all signs are in flux, trembling with their inherent instability, all objects shift and mutate. In contrast, the city as theatre is marked as found for Wentworth, always already there, preceding discovery. Thus we can read ABSOLUT SEMICONDUCTOR and ABSOLUT WENTWORTH across degrees of 'animation': the latter traces the residue the city produces, whereas Semiconductor re-enacts such productions by imaging and amplifying their collapse.

The city, as theatrical space, has as one of its players the ever-present figure of the brand name as signage that leaves its mark on objects and buildings." Richard Wentworth and Semiconductor's collaboration with ABSOLUT articulates, as a kind of double take - from the local images of London to the digital renderings of the global city - art and advertising as outlets for signing the world. Generations are bridged in practices that simultaneously embrace and interrogate the city. Mind the Gap. 5

1 See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, London: Penguin Books, 220 edition

2 Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities, London: Vintage, 1997 edition, p 12.

3 Holstenwall is the home of the 1920s classic German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Calighari, directed by Robert Wiene.

4 Brett Stele has written recently on the relationship between architecture and branding in his article ‘ Absolut Mies, Absolut Modern’, in AA Files 48,2003 ,pp 2-14.

5 The authors would like to thank Nina Kreiger for her thoughtful comments and diligent editing

June 2003

Richard Wentworth.

Absolut Generations Catalogue essay

http://absolut.com/

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN RICHARD WENTWORTH

AND SEMICONDUCTOR (AS IMAGINED BY RW)

RICHARD WENTWORTH: The thing we call London is a city-state. Brighton, where you live, is part of that economy but 60 miles separate us. I was thinking how funny it was that we first met 'on the telephone'. The phone is an agent of conversation and reciprocation where you interpret qualities in other people - but you have to turn detective to achieve very much.

SEMICONDUCTOR: Maybe we will remember this adventure as telephone dating? Perhaps the most imaginative thing we have done is to generate enough mutual trust and goodwill to give our collaboration a chance to succeed?

RW: I feel like a found object, actually. Is this art's answer to Blind Date?

SC: Well, without an instinct for making our own luck, we were never going to develop the working confidence to generate a collaborative approach. Anyway, your own working methods are assembled to avoid the bombastic, which helps. Asking a pair of artists to work back to back with a third one in an unknown space, framed by very dense cultural contexts is a sort of obstacle course. Why not test ourselves to see if we're}it enough?

RW: Working as a pair, is this a way of keeping fit? About half the letters in the two words, competition and collaboration are shared. How do they work for you two? Are the diplomatic negotiations in a project like this one anything like the way you develop work between yourselves?

SC: You described us as voyagers, and there are two distinct areas that we have to laminate together when we 'travel' - first there's how we trust and challenge each other and divide up the labour, but then there's our sense of audiences - ones which both participate and criticise. Our strength, perhaps, is that we really admire each other's work.

RW: People are mostly unaware how elaborate the so-called art world is. On the one hand it's a small self-regarding tribal thing, but it's really an illegible tessellation of parts, which over and under lap, and it's certainly multi-dimensional. You both know a lot about sculpture, but your sensitivity to film, to music, to sound, to noise, seems to have led you through architecture to a kind of dream urbanism - a world that you fly through. That's a metaphor, perhaps, for the fugitive feeling of modern lives. Itchy feet, in two places at once, always on the move. Perhaps we all live by peripheral vision now? Once we were inhabitants, but now we are ‘exhabitants'.

SC: When we all traveled to Venice in mid-April, we enjoyed discovering how swiftly we were moving across subjects in our conversations - lots of rhyming intimacies mixed up with bigger concerns.

RW: I liked the way you spoke about light and weather and living on the edge of the land. (A Puerto Rican friend said that people who live on islands always think they live at the centre of the world - the English never doubt this). I also liked the way you talked about plants as if they were small-animated artworks, looking for light and surviving stressful salty weather conditions.

SC: Plants are like artists.

RW: I think you have one really timeless interest the lie of the land. Your work reminds me how odd landscape is, something we only witness from our 'point of view'. You seem very alert to the politics of the land - the way it takes up form and colour, the way we shape it, travel in it, survey it and view it. The way we divide it up. We might build something in Venice like a wall; but we want it to be neither canal nor fondamenta. We hope it's permeable, we hope to share this experience, to merge space. Is that right?

SC: Well, travelling with other people is a kind of curatorial event. Venice itself is a sort of slowed down road movie in which you become very conscious of assembling diverse encounters. Anonymous discarded photo albums are sometimes like catalogues to exhibitions you missed. Somehow we'd like to borrow from that form - constraints of time and place often generate the best work. We think our job, curatorially, is to be successful tourists of the Palazzo Zenobio space. We like the new European order where Britain has both Czech and Swedish borders.

Sonar Text.

Sonar festival, Barcelona.

http://www.sonar.es/

Artificial Expressionism by Semiconductor

Article for SonarText 2002 by Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt

www.semiconductorfilms.com

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 crossover of practices and techniques is evolving in the form of short films and videos, where data flow and the interpretation of information is explored formally and representationally.

Artists from Qubo Gas to reMI are conducting unique explorations in an emerging international network. As audiences adapt to changing trends alongside these developments, new forms of expression are rapidly emerging, keeping pace with technological progress. From cinema or internet based films to live video performances, the context is constantly in flux. This pixel fuelled abstraction puts a static style in motion that was historically confined to the printed page. Set against the digital noise and sample degradation of certain electronic music, Artificial Expressionism the scene, has emerged. These artists are producing the work that sets an ultimatum for the termination of wallpaper visuals.

The initial wave of underground video for live and experimental electronic music in the mid-nineties was mainly concerned with sampling and collaging images. It re-contextualised the TV culture of mass media and focused on disinformation by under- mining the medium and rhythmically choreographing video bytes to the music. More recently the computer boom has led to a proliferation of PCs and ‘warez’. What was once expensive to produce became available via the domestic market and as computers improved, users developed their skills alongside the potential of the hardware and software. With this, new digital audio-visual techniques and styles developed and the focus became the potential of what the new technologies could achieve in the hands of the artist. The current digital boom in the audio-visual world relates to the freedom that previous technological advances introduced. Low cost computers can now handle video as they first could audio five years ago. This explosion of new work is not unexpected considering the artist is always at the forefront of new technologies. The contemporary artist’s role might be seen as exploring the relationship between technique and visual representation.

Certain branches of the electronic music scene were getting closer to forms of artistic expressions leaving behind their origins in dance music. Artists like Oval, Panasonic, Mille Plateaux/ Mego artists began to push the limits of technology. They stretched the limits of human audible perception and started to explore the listening side of dance music.

Two audio-visual styles stand out in this field. Firstly there is a formal exploration that presents the raw data and analogue signal. Neither tampering with nor re-contextualising the information. Through the dysfunction of hardware/software the digital error is exploited as part of the process. The glitch is born as a creative element. This

deconstruction reveals the flaws and cracks within the hygienic purity of the computer, using this dirt or grain as a reflection of the non-linear randomness in reality. In its most reduced form the computer manipulated image becomes a pixel whilst the sound equivalent becomes a single tone or pulse. Using digital information as the carrier signal for the image, pixel and audio glitches become the context for Artificial Expressionism.

The second style is focused on digital representation. Which combines technique with content and digital with analogue. The work is more informed by the signature of the artist rather than by the computer itself. Although each artist may use the same software they use it in a personal way.

Works that come from these approaches often defy definition; are they films, visual music scores or works of art? These works challenge the genre of cut and paste club visuals or MTV filler. Within this digital arena artists are producing more focused, considered works.

Many visual artists have found common ground within this exploration of digital space. Each computer system or piece of software has its own limitations that offer creative potential beyond its own intended use.

Artists like reMI and Bas Van Koolwijk (Austria/Holland) found a personal style through process based pieces. reMI explains “For instance, by allowing a particular version of Adobe Premiere to run in a windows environment the computer becomes irritated and itself produces images. Because the image is disturbed it flips out and begins to live a life of its own. As soon as you open the file of the video signal, the structure repeats itself in the frame. Files of this sort are the basic foundation of images for the film.” SoundLab artists (NYC) Howard Goldkrand and Beth Coleman’s film ‘Tilt’, was similarly formed out of electronically disturbed code where images were taken from the flow of data.

Qubo Gas’ (France) slant is personal, abstract and figurative. In Collaborations with musicians Dat Politics, similar methods can be found in both parties, they have treated the viewer to a noisy mess of pixels and badly cutup graphical squiggles that wholly complement the quirky abstract nature of each other.

In their latest live audio-visual performance ‘Vanty Pup’, Scratch Pet Land play the soundtrack while Qubo Gas perform their interactive animation.

Skot (Austria) have helped to establish a scene around live video and digital manipulation. There are growing communities who implement Nato (a software plug in that allows access to control the actual video data source) who create algorhythmic influenced and hacked images.

People Like Us (UK) have developed a visual narrative style based on sampling cultural oddities and have now begun to produce much of their work as musical films. Their seems to be a growing focus on having a video element in live electronic music and many musicians are taking this idea on board personally by developing their own music and video simultaneously. Although People Like Us and other sample based musicians have a tradition of using readymade music and video, their ability to work this way is dependant on computer collage and editing and has as much to do with the digital scene as the more extreme formal works.

Throughout our work we have sought to physically tie the senses of sight and sound in an attempt to transcend their differences and possibly find a place where they have no distinction. We have explored particular system errors, wrenching out broken data as the visual and aural content to produce process based films. Works which are a true fusion of sound and image, and are often the same thing. The flow of data through the system is split into separate elements and given a role reversal, presenting the image as the sound or the sound as the image. In works such as Puffedrice and Yes You Are Right! (‘A direct aural assault on the retina’), we forged ways to channel the audio information into a visual form. Sometimes they are taken from the same source (data/signal), and have been diverted from their designed path to find themselves being read by the wrong sensory organs. In these formal explorations the computer is both the method and the content. Through an absence of metaphors, the digital and analogue signals hold a neutrality of their own. They were never made to be read by our eyes and ears. The film ‘A to Z of Noise’,(‘a sound recording of the 20th century played in 60 seconds’), uses the tools for cleaning up images and audio to create interference by pushing them beyond their limits.

In other films we take a different approach blending the hand made with digital and analogue data. Each has a distinctive visual style which acknowledges the role of the computer as co-architect (semi-conductor). Experimenting with the direct relationship between sound and image, we use the landscape of architecture, as a means to describe an aural and visual interpretation of the world; Retropolis (1999) takes the viewer through a paper constructed sci-fi London where electricity is the audible terrain, Linear (2001) links the sub-atomic world of the ‘String theory’ to our urban landscapes through the vibrations of sound, and in Earthquake Films (2000) cities and buildings are shaken by songlines sung by earthquakes. Most recently collaborations with musicians QT and Mứm have widened our acoustic playground. These methods of representation create clear links between the audio and the visual landscape where fictional relationships are suggested. As soundscapes define the narrative the cinematic sets the scene.

Artificial Expressionism consents to a pledge between the artist and the computer as they cooperate to evolve new senses and meanings. These have a dynamic relationship with the audience where the creation takes many forms, as cinema or online works and as live performance. Artists have a role in channelling the status quo in its acceptance of digital media as the new art form.

Current audio-visual experimentation is laying the foundations for future expressions. Possibilities for live and experimental manipulation of time based images have come to the forefront of this multi-disciplinary field. As the power to create more complex live narratives develops, there will be a greater engagement in questioning the role of the computer and what it brings to the work.

Edited by Greg Daville

www.peoplelikeus.org

www.qubogas.com

http://remi.mur.at

www.semiconductorfilms.com

www.skot.at

SonarText June 2002

Soundtoys Interview 2001

http://www.soundtoys.net/

Questions and Answers…..
Semiconductor: Domestic E.M.I. + DVD

'Semiconductor are artists who make films out of sound. Experimenting with the direct relationship between sound and image, they use the landscape of architecture around us, as a means to describe the aural and abstract visual interpretation of the world. Blending digital and analogue, combining the hand made with data, their work takes on board the randomness and errors found within computer systems as co-architect.'

How do you define "soundtoys" ?

‘SoundToys’ covers an immense genre of interactive sound/visual media which exists on a computer.

On a personal level, why do you make this work?/What is you project and your work about?

Our Art interests crossed so many mediums and senses that we had to find an appropriate platform to express our ideas. Originally we were making installations and sound / music separately, dealing with the architecture of landscapes, but eventually we found an equilibrium within ‘animation’. We now call our work "Sound Films", as the visual narrative is mostly led by the audio content or sometimes both the audio and visual elements become the same information and process. Within our films we deal with abstract audio initially, as a way to reintroduce various levels of abstract fiction. The end product is also very important to us as there tends to be quite a reluctance for the public to deal with 'digital art'. Our work exists on as many platforms as possible, films for cinemas, online interactive environments and now through a released DVD-Video/ROM that we sell mostly via underground record shops and art book shops.

The artist is always at the forefront of new technology exploring a relationship between technique and visual representation. This is partly where we are coming from, a ground roots interest in exploring creative techniques with the new tools available with computers and combining this with core interests in sound and space.

Domestic E.M.I. is our latest piece that furthers interactivity in our work. It wasn't an issue of needing to produce online work, but that it was appropriate for how we were working, creatively and in terms of an international audience. This project came about from an artists residency for a 'Disinformation' show, we responded with an 'acoustic diagram' which by using external links to acoustic and vibration sites, took you on a discovery journey of magnetic interference in our daily lives. As well as providing information through a playful means on these areas, it exists as an art work.

The DVD came about through a need to unite and distribute our short sound films, and the challenge arose to work in a new field, exploring new territories. As with all technology it’s always a fight to make sure it doesn't take over, that you manage to succeed in representing the idea you visualise in your head. There was nothing we could refer to when deciding how to compose the DVD technically, we knew we wanted to create an environment which mirrored elements of our own films, uniting them, creating more of a world than presenting individual pieces. This involved a lot of laborious research and false starts - we started off experimenting with VRML (virtual reality modelling language) to create the interactive menu and DVD-Rom section but soon realised it was already a redundant technology. The result now is something we are really pleased with. We managed to play around with the way this technology is currently deployed and also nudge the construction of an interactive menu, in more of a dynamic direction.

The interfaces all stem from either elements of our own films on the DVD or from techniques and styles which we have employed to make them. It’s important that we produce all the elements, as after all we are working as artists rather than commercial producers. We see the DVD as an 'art object', not exclusive in anyway but something which is viewed over and over. It was important for us that all the film-makers were making sound films or collaborating with musicians, contemporary structured pieces of work where the film makers are developing their own style and technique rather than relying on the technology for this. We are tackling the non defined area of works that get programmed as 'experimental shorts' and outside of that get horribly labelled as 'visuals'....the idea is that these works get seen in a new context without having to fall back on the likes of MTV for a bland notion of acceptance.

How long have you been working in this area?
We started making music in 1994 but practiced visual art mainly until 1998 when we started to use computers to bring the two together. Our first film was finished in 1999 and since then we have made 12 films and videos, some of which are slightly more conventional music videos. We are currently making videos for the record label Fat Cat and have complete freedom to work with our own ideas.

Were you an artist/ musician first who got into using computers/the net, or did you respond to the net as a medium in an artistic way?

We use the Net as we would any other medium in our practice, and because of the nature of our work that crossing over is quite a fluid process. We don't directly challenge its artistic value as a medium in terms of questioning its validity, as we see it as an additional tool to furthering the possibilities of our work.

What/ who has influenced you in your work? (Themes, other artists etc)

Our influences really came from the surge of experimental music over the past 7 or so years. A current favourite influence is the films of Karl Sims who develops artificial life form simulation.

Are there any other artists covering the same field as you?
There are artists who we have an affinity with in terms of their outlook, motivations and creativity but these aren't necessary people who are covering the same field as us. When we participate in festivals we tend to get put into the vague 'experimental' section which normally carries a few familiar names throughout that circuit. These being people working with sound and image as short films

With regard to 'soundtoys' especially, why do you think the audio visual form is so key to the net?
Well, the majority of 'sound toys' are very playful examples of what can be achieved through making sound processes a very visual experience. The net provides a platform which is non-specific, it means the work doesn't need to be categorisable, for example by placing itself in an art gallery situation or an acoustic experiment etc. it has the freedom which allows the producer to experiment without any fixed parameters. Unfortunately this does mean that all 'online sound works' become lumped under one title of 'soundtoys'.

How important is the visual aspect in the 'new' relationship of the audio visual.?
The visual aspect is definitely underdeveloped in the current spate of 'sound toys'. The experiments exist in lying foundations for what will come, developing techniques where the visual aspect is not communicating in itself but more being used as a reference point on a screen. The emphasis lies within the ease to combine and present audio and visual material rather than pushing any visual boundaries.

Does the net promote visual awareness that is unique to it?

It not so much that the net promotes unique visual awareness, but its availability opens up new possibilities of viewing, at home, at school etc... creating unique contexts for viewing work which in turn leads to new ways of seeing.

Do you think there is a history to audio visual work?
There is a huge history of audio visual work, way before computers were invented in any form people realised a relationship between sound image and how one supported the other in the development of art.

Semiconductor: DVD – Hi-Fi Rise Why and how we made it…..

We made the DVD through a need to compile our short ‘sound films’ , and saw the possibilities to unite these by creating interactive worlds for them to exist in.

There were no independent releases when we started, and we realised the main challenge was to work creatively with the medium.
As with all technology it’s always a fight to make sure it doesn't take over, that you manage to succeed in representing the idea you visualise in your head. There was nothing we could refer to when deciding how to compose the DVD technically; we knew we wanted to create an environment which mirrored
elements of our own films, uniting them, creating more of a world than presenting individual pieces. This involved a lot of laborious research and
false starts - we started off experimenting with VRML (virtual reality modelling language) to create the interactive menu and DVD-Rom section but soon realised it was already a redundant technology. We worked with QuickTime and director to create the DVD-Rom section. The result now is something we are really pleased with. We managed to play around with the way this technology is currently deployed and also nudge the construction of an interactive menu, in more of a dynamic direction.

The interfaces all stem from either elements of our own films on the DVD or from techniques and styles which we have employed to make them. Its important that we produce all the elements, as after all we are working as artists rather than commercial producers. We see the DVD as an 'art object', not exclusive in anyway but something which is viewed over and over.

Semiconductor: Domestic E.M.I. why and how we made it

This project came about from an artists residency for a 'Disinformation' show. Disinformation aka. Joe Banks works with atmospheric recordings and delves into the depths of relationships between these and mans experience of noise, origins of image and sound and beyond.
We responded with an 'acoustic diagram' which by using external links to acoustic and vibration sites, took you on a discovery journey of magnetic interference in our daily lives. As well as providing information, through a playful means, on these areas, it exists as an art work.

The main navigational area is constructed in Flash, utilising action script for specific sound and visual interaction, where the objects respond to the actual waveform. Domestic E.M.I. uses external links as a resource of information, which relates to the interactive journeys through sound and vibration. The external links become part of the fiction the landscape portrays.

Can you recommend three urls to soundtoys?

http://library.thinkquest.org/19537/java/Doppler.html

http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/Demos/radiation/radiation.html

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/audiovision/

Sleazenation magazine

http://www.sleazenation.com

Sonic Cities by Jack Sargeant

The work of Semiconductor Films and their friends may be difficult to calcify – often simplistically labelled ‘experimental shorts’ or even ‘visuals’ at present by many – but no matter. Check out their new self-released DVD and discover what’s going on in the world of avant garde filmmaking.

Crazed animation, abstract film, found footage and plunderphonic aesthetics are just some of the pleasures to be had from Hi-Fi Rise, the new DVD from Semiconductor Films. Semiconductor are Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, two artists who create films out of sound, and their pieces here include Retropolis, an animated re-negotiation of the city, the Harry Smith-esque abstract animation of New Antics, and The A to Z of Noise, which pulses with multicoloured static in time to an increasingly hypnotic and eventually brain-erasing frequency. Semiconductor's aesthetic is perhaps best exemplified in their brilliant Linear, which effectively breaks down the relationship between image and sound and sees a digitally created abstracted landscape as the zone of musical realisation.

Hi-Fi Rise also contains six films by other contemporary avant-garde filmmakers, including New Knowledge, an exploration of learning using found footage by People Like Us, and Crystallisation, by Ian Helliwell, who has created startling patterns and colours by literally taking to super 8 celluloid with ink and bleach. All contributors share a sense of visual experimentation and a desire to explore alchemical possibilities. As Semiconductor state: "It was important for us that all the filmmakers were either making sound films or collaborating with musicians; contemporary structured pieces of work where they are developing their own style and technique rather than relying on the technology for it. We're tackling the nondefined area of works that gets programmed as 'experimental shorts', and outside of that get horribly labelled as 'visuals'. The idea is that these works get seen in a new context without having to fall back on the likes of MTV for a bland notion of acceptance."

The DVD is possibly one of the first to be produced by contemporary underground/avantgarde filmmakers, and, with few reference points, Semiconductor had to explore the potentials of the format. "As with all technology it's always a fight to make sure it doesn't take over, that you manage to succeed in representing the idea you visualise in your head. We knew we wanted to create an environment which mirrored elements of our own films, uniting them, creating more of a world than presenting individual pieces. This involved a lot of laborious research and false starts. The result is something we are really pleased with. We managed to play around with the way this technology is currently deployed, and also nudge the construction of an interactive menu, in more of a dynamic direction."

Since the release of Hi-Fi Rise, Semiconductor have been keeping themselves busy on two projects. "We've just finished a collaborative piece for a Fat Cat musician called QT. Titled Digital Anthrax, it's our first war movie, and at fifty seconds it took us two weeks inside a world of noise and evolution. Whereas Anti-Matterhorn, our avalanche movie, has been going on for over two years now - if we're lucky it may get finished in 2002!'

Jan/Feb 2002

Res magazine.

http://www.res.com/index.res.html

Looks Sound by Lina D.Russell

Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt - aka Semiconductor describe their work as "making films out of sound." The Brighton-based duo have been making videos and music since 1997, developing a particular blend of visual and aural explorations by establishing a direct relationship between image and sound. "We have sought to physically tie the senses of sight and sound in an attempt to transcend their differences and find a place where they have no distinction," they explain. "We forged ways to channel the audio information into visual form." Over the years, Semiconductor has collaborated on films with a host of electronic musicians such as Dat Politics, Mum, People Like Us and Cristian Vogel, as well as with record labels including Mute, Fat Cat and Warp.

Their recent DVD release Hi-Fi Rise - Sonic Cities From Another Timeline is one of the first independently produced short film DVD compilations in the UK. Partly a curatorial initiative and partly a showcase of their own work, Hi-Fi Rise's 14 shorts are accessed by traveling through Semiconductor's fictional sonic city with its hand-drawn buildings and dark alleys - a place reminiscent of Holstenwall, the home of the 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The selection of shorts includes People Like Us' plunderphonic visions of children singing in unison in what seems to be a trance-like state, Semiconductor Dat Politics pixel-loving collaboration featuring a lo-fi airplane journey, Ian Helliwell's Super 8 scratch-and-paint piece Crystallisation and Semiconductor's own visions of an imaginary London in which all you see and hear is the electricity passing through millions of flickering light bulbs.

A masterful mélange of lo-fi techniques, sophisticated 3-D worlds and explorations of visual and aural glitches, Hi-Fi Rise twists the hierarchy of the senses to create unique worlds in which the narratives are defined by sounds.

sept/oct 2002