Worlds in the Making
Worlds in the Making is an installation created by Semiconductor, artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhart. The piece is a video that takes place on three connected and angled screens. It works to show how people interact and see the nature around them. Seismic data was collected from under volcanoes and used to create audio; this audio was then used to generate CG crystals forming and different movements of the landscapes in order to relay the natural building and breaking that occurs throughout the world. The audience sees these dystopic and changing landscapes along with some of the other ways that people interact with the landscapes.
Worlds in the Making asks its audience to take the landscapes they see, and experience them from a new angle. So much change has occurred to get these landscapes to look the way they are, but that change has never been captured. Worlds in the Making gives its viewers the opportunity to see these different changes occur, based on information that is dictated by different landscapes themselves.
"Jarman and Gerhardt combined photography of stark volcanic landscapes with animations and audio feeds of geological processes to capture the sense of a primeval, newborn world." Swain, Frank (July 2011) Art and Science Combine at Worlds in the Making Exhibit.
Many pieces of Semiconductor's work focus on parts of the environment, like 20Hz. This piece utilizes a geo-magnetic storm that occurred in the Earth's upper atmosphere, the different sounds and winds were captured at the frequency of 20 hertz, and used to create these different visuals. This is another example of Semiconductor creating visuals for something that is happening in the world, but that humans are unable to see; people will be able to understand the concepts of a geo-magnetic storm better because of 20Hz.
Timothy Weaver's ArthropodaChordataConiferophyta is another piece that create visual and sonic images from data, but ArthropodaChordataConiferophyta brings new life to the Rocky Mountain Locust and the Passenger Pigeon, two extinct species. Weaver's piece uses,
"transcoding software that translates the genetic/DNA and protein sequences from these species to equivalent sonic sequences and sound envelopes" Weaver, Timothy (2014). ArthropodaChordataConiferophyta .
These different species have been gone for over a century, but people are able to better understand them through Timothy Weaver's work.
Gerhardt explains that,
"We're really playing with the idea of the science documentary," he adds. "Everyone is very familiar now with the very standard format of creating a narrative and a way of documenting science, and hopefully we're challenging this."Swain, Frank (July 2011) Art and Science Combine at Worlds in the Making Exhibit.
These ideas of challenging how science is documented is a new way to connect more people with the science that is happening around them everyday. The mentality that to learn something, one must first open up a textbook no longer holds to be true, instead there are ever changing ways to see and experience the science that happens under human's' feet. This artworks has to ability to broaden individuals connections with science and landscapes and allows for them to see these findings through a new means.
This solo exhibition first showed at Liverpool's Foundation for Art and Creative Technology gallery.
