Site specific Sound Film installation at Palazzo Zenobio, Venice Biennale 2003:
Each of Semiconductors five Sound Films which were installed on 7" widescreen LCD screens.
Semiconductor worked with Richard Wentworth in a protégé/mentor relationship and both installed art works for 'Absolut Generations' in room six of the Palazzo Zenobio.
launch slide show of installation

The Mini-Epoch Series is to be featured in a book on writing computer software for the arts. Semiconductor were interiviewed about the whys and hows of the project.
Programming Media: A pragmatic foundation in writing software for the arts.
Casey Reas and Ben Fry
published by MIT Spring 2007.

Extract of the text:
Why did you create The Mini-Epoch Series?

We were invited to create a site specific art work for the Venice Biennale 2003, in Palazzo Zenobio, Venice.
Many layers of topography surround the exhibition location. The historical Palazzo and its courtyard are encircled by the famous canals of Venice, these again are enclosed by a Lagoon that is also bounded by the sea. No city we have ever been to has had such a clear ecological destiny. The city was founded by a unique collection of nomads and travellers that wished to stay away from the permanence of solid ground but who are now long gone, leaving this symbolic and crumbling dead city or at best a living museum.

The temporality is apparent all around, making evident to us the fate of all cities and eventually all places we know. This humbling but sentimental view is withheld from the work, instead we associate with the architectures own impartial view on the matter. Each element of the work, which spanned five screens, portrays a micro-topology and its statistical changes over time. Reanimating some facet of a fictional civilisations progress and ultimate demise, we reveal perspectives that are invisible to us as a result of our short life span.

What is The Mini-Epoch Series?
Five one minute sound films, each installed on a 7" widescreen LCD display.
Filmed, animated and exhibited in Palazzo Zenobio.

Screen One: Stop frame animation of a puddle drying up over a period of four hours in Palazzo Zenobio courtyard. Composited graphics represent population density fluctuating over hundreds of years according to the availability of water, as the lake depletes. The sound controls the statistics according to the rate of evaporation.

Screen Two: Stop frame animation of the sun moving across the floor of Palazzo Zenobio. Animated within the suns path are composited graphical representations of land use, which adapt to the availability of sunlight over thousands of years. The sound fluctuates consistent with the strength of sunlight, which in turn controls the transition of land use.

Screen Three: Fictional animation of the sun moving across a Palazzo Zenobio room and up the wall; made using actual data of the suns path for that time and place. We track the windows path across the wall as buildings are constructed in the city, forming animated silhouettes. The shadow from the encroaching city subsequently blocks out the light and sends the room into total darkness. Here we witness the construction of Venice's past or future over hundreds of years.

Screen Four: Stop frame animation of a peeling painted wall within the exhibition space. As the landscape shifts over thousands of years the inhabitants migrate across this vast desert-scape.

Screen Five: Animation bringing to life the motion of the Venetian architecture in the saturated terrain over hundreds of years.