Semiconductor's landscapes as sound-sculptured time-based visualizations

摘要

The results of artistic experimentation with data sets from the natural sciences differ considerably with respect to quality and consistency. The British artist duo Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) counts among those setting the standard. In its animations and videos, it explores, in an equally multifaceted and concise manner, how scientists affect our world-view with their respective pictorial languages and visualization strategies. Especially in domains that elude our natural sense of space and time, the researchers' representations are inevitably creative. Semiconductor combines everyday experiences and complex imaging techniques in manifold ways. Thus, they offer unseen and sometimes unorthodox interpretations of a world in constant flux while retaining a high degree of complexity in their subtly crafted works. Semiconductor's works provide opportunities for reflection on the extensive procedures in the sciences on various levels and in doing so they create poetic pieces that shift and recombine in various ways. With these means, sensualized data - like sounds and images - take on a strong role in their time-based works. As operative entities they not only represent but they seem to act.