Posted by Semiconductor – artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt – have put their new film ’20HZ’ online.
2oHZ, Semiconductor, 2011
I encountered their early experimental animation work when part of a panel which selected them for an artists’ residency at NASA Space Sciences Lab in Berkeley in 2006. Their mesmerising ‘Brilliant Noise’ (2006), in which grainy black and white images of the sun, using raw satellite data captured by the Soho satellite, presented a radical aesthetic alternative to the glossy, cleaned up, over-coloured cosmological photos produced by NASA, and the witty ‘Do You Think Science …’ (2006) – both embedded below – were part of a remarkable body of work that resulted from that residency. Since then I’ve watched with admiration their steadily growing output of moving image works, which continue to explore the physical universe and the material nature of our world and the scientists who study those.
In ’20HZ’, the pair play with data from a geo-magnetic storm in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, this time captured by the CARISMA radio array, generating sound and moving images, visually reminiscent of some of Woody and Steina Vasulka‘s experimental video works but part of a growing area of astronomy data-generated work. ’20HZ’ is showing as part of the Invisible Fields exhibition at Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona.
Brilliant Noice, Semiconductor, 2011
Do You Think Science …?, Semiconductor, 2011
Nicola Triscott 
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