This is a duo consisting of Ruth Jarman , born in 1973, and Joe Gerhardt , born in 1972. They live and work in Brighton, UK, and seek to create visual and sound works from science of changing landscapes and animated films. Semiconductor explores the ephemeral nature of our world and wondered about our place in the universe by reinventing the look that you wear on science and technology, revealing and the singular beauty of the heavenly body movements and revolts of the material.
After invading the Venice Biennale, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Barbican in London, they invest the theatre of Jacques-Decour school during the Nuit Blanche in Paris and present two works, Black Rain and Heliocentric in this place that once hosted Édouard Manet, Gustave Moreau and François Truffaut as students, which opens at night for the first time since the student protests of May 68.
In 2011, Semiconductor introduces a new creation to the FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Liverpool. This is Worlds in the Making, a fragmented video installation in three separate parts made from dystopian perspectives on volcanology, seismology data is converted into sound equipment, delivering a soundtrack evoking the sound of stones, clouds anxiety of smoke and lava flows. The result is a moving testimony about the origins of the world, and the language that is both tender and cruel and fragile nature.
Heliocentric for the duo focuses on the role played by the sun, the source of all energy, all life in our galaxy. The work is constructed from an accelerated photomontage and astronomical techniques for monitoring the path of the sun, and presents the rat race of the fuel loaded star through a series of landscapes.
Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt working with NASA scientists using the raw data of twin satellites Stereo mission which aims to provide information on solar flares and their effects on the terrestrial environment. The result will be Black Rain, a projection using images that have not been reworked, the primary source of material, with all initial impurities original recordings to create a work recalling the subjective view and distant from the human observer .
Solar data is also at the heart of Brilliant Noise, a creation that uses the archive black and white different observatories, conducted in Space Sciences Laboratory of NASA in Berkeley, California. Unreal representations that result from scientific imaging give the impression of watching the chaos in front, this dizzying chaos from which we came. All the work of Semiconductor based there: detect the parallel reality of what we can not see or understand, and show the fragments of that intangible but very real world.