Colourful, haunting and evocative, UK art duo Semiconductor use data from real voclanic eruptions and earthquakes, including the Kaikoura quake, to show how the Earth moves.
Colourful, haunting and evocative, UK art duo Semiconductor use data from real voclanic eruptions and earthquakes, including the Kaikoura quake, to show how the Earth moves.
Lowdown What: Semiconductor: The Technological Sublime and Eva Rothschild: Kosmos Where & When: City Gallery, Wellington; Semiconductor March 23 – July 14, Eva Rothschild, April 6 – July 28
For the briefest of seconds, the sound is almost comforting – perhaps the buzzing of insects on a warmsummer's day – but it isn't long before it becomes ominous: a humming coupled with what may be the creaking and groaning of eroding metal, a long abandoned factory where someone left too quickly to shut down the industrial machines; the drip, drip, dripping of fetid water in rusting pipes and the wind squeezing itself through gaps in a decaying structure.
This is the score to the mesmerising five channel computer generated animation Earthworks (2016) made by British artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt – Semiconductor – to show, in glorious detail and colour, how landscapes form during millennia.
It uses the scientific and technological devices that study these processes to create colourful layers that are animated by the soundscapes of earthquake, volcanic, glacial and human activity, recorded as seismic waves, which form spectacular fluctuating marbled waveforms.
It's been sped up so the seismic simulation takes only a matter of minutes to enthral and make viewers forget they're watching a moving image artwork made with data from real-world volcanoes, glaciers and earthquakes – including the 2016 Kaikoura quake.
This autumn, Semiconductor's work – in a show called The Technological Sublime – will be one of two drawcards in a "double dose of international art" at Wellington's City Gallery. The UK duo, who marries art and science, join Ireland's 2019 Venice Biennale representative Eva Rothschild in a provocative double bill.
Eva Rothschild puts a distinctive spin on modernist sculpture traditions, using novel construction methods and materials including concrete, polyurethane foam, steel and plastic. Photo/Robert Glowacki
– the first Australasian survey show of her sculpture – is playful and interactive,
The Technological Sublime
could well capture the imagination of New Zealanders well-schooled in earthquake drills through living in a country once nicknamed "the shaky isles".
So, is right to make art using data borne out of terrifying events caused by a planet in near constant motion? Speaking to Weekend from their Brighton base, Jarman and Gerhardt stress that it's bigger than human experience.
"Our work is about thinking of things that are bigger than us and, in doing that, we end up looking at phenomena – natural phenomena – that can be quite destructive," says Jarman. "It's not only earthquake data but also in a piece of work we'll be showing at City Gallery, Black Rain, things like the solar wind which is impacting and causing problems on Earth all the time.
"We hope, through working with these things, that we can enable people to look at phenomena from a different perspective and gaze at it in a different way. We're very interested in creating this humbling experience and questioning man's place in nature."
Gerhardt agrees, saying earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are assumed to be negative because they're frequently tragic for people, but that looks at the phenomena on a limited time and spatial scale. It forgets the long-term impacts, such as creating fertile soil or unlocking minerals.
"…we're not focusing on the part that is the suffering; we're focusing on something that exists outside of the everyday."
Up Close - Semiconductor's Earthworks (2016) includes data from the Kaikoura earthquake.
City Gallery director Elizabeth Caldwell says when it comes to life's more somber experiences, one of the benefits of incorporating these into art is that it keeps events in people's minds.
"It reminds us that they happen to us, not people somewhere else," says Caldwell. "They often provide us with different perspectives on the topic, helping us to see it from a different angle. It's important that we reflect on them through as many avenues as possible because people respond to different stimuli… it's all about sharing the experience and cultivating empathy."
And it's not as if Semiconductor hasn't had many years to reflect upon and refine what it does. Life partners, Jarman and Gerhardt have been making art – mainly moving image work – for 25 years, often in partnership with science agencies including NASA, the Smithsonian, the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands and CERN.
The latter's also known as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, home to the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator which was once thought to be able to cause a black hole.
Gerhardt says they still like to approach science in a "naïve sort of way" where wonder and knowledge building, core to our experience of the natural world, remains at the forefront of what they do.
"… really, we're just using science as a medium within our work, as a language."
Jarman says it's also important to the duo to consider how scientific tools and processes influence the way we experience nature. Is what we're presented with a true representation?
"We're not wanting to take scientists' language and teach people about the science; we're looking for different experiences of the science so sometimes that can frustrate the scientists because they hope we're going in with a specialist idea about their particular topic…"
Jarman acknowledges some scientists take time to accept them being in a lab but objections are usually overcome once she and Gerhardt start asking questions and actually listening to the answers. A three-month residency at NASA turned into six as those in the Space Sciences Lab warmed to what they were doing.
"There's quite a good example of one scientist; we used to spend every day just roaming around the lab seeing what people were doing and we came across this guy who had this vacuum chamber and he was doing this amazing experiment. We wanted to know all about it and he was really happy to talk to us and, after a while, he said, 'is it okay that I'm still talking to you about this because, you know, my family don't let me talk to them about space science'."
It's growing field of interest for artists but, as Jarman points out, also for scientists. When they first started in the 1990s, they had to fight for access to labs and data. Now, scientists approach them because they know art helps them present information to the public.
"I think what we do does help to break down a certain barrier that exists between science and the general public in that you feel you can start to ask questions of it… That's not the intention when we're making the work but it can be a kind of byproduct of the way that we're reinterpreting the science and representing it."
And with that, the interview concludes so Jarman can pack. To travel to Patagonia where artists and scientists, individuals and organisations, are getting together to discuss how, in future, they can better work together.
