visually innocuous igneous rocks

Art One of the more thrilling memories I have of children’s television in the eighties was watching grainy 16mm footage of a Blue Peter presenter, who in my memory was Simon Groom, standing in the midst of a volcanic eruption, seemingly on the edge of death. As far as I could see, the whole steaming, streaming rock face could have potentially smothered him and yet all Groom was interested in was showing us just how hot these visually innocuous igneous rocks really were by attempting to kick them with his suede shoes, only skipping away when the menacing matter finally came just that bit too close.

That led to a life long fascination with volcanoes and so I’m predisposed to love Worlds in the Making, the new work from Semiconductor, the art duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt on display at FACT Liverpool from the 2nd July, the press preview for which I’ve just returned from. I can’t often accept such invitations because of work, but I'm on holiday at the moment so it was worth attending at least to see the hospitality professional reviewers enjoy. As I discovered, a chance to see the exhibition before/without the public, a short talk from curators and artists and (for the purposes of full disclosure) a very nice buffet lunch.

Semiconductor have been working together for fifteen years and Worlds in the Making is another of their artistic investigations into the natural world and how science changes our perception of it. The culmination of a three year project, the film in FACT’s Gallery 1 pulls together a mass of research collected and sent to them from vulcanologists studying globally and visits to the Smithsonian Institute’s natural history department. Effectively they carried out their own scientific exploration but are presenting their results artistically, utilising the data to produce a film that blurs fiction and reality, with us becoming their peer review community.

At first glance, probably no matter when that glance happens in its twenty-three minute duration, the viewer seems to be watching a kind of minimalist documentary about a volcanic eruption, from first observations of a potential catastrophe through to the moment when its best to get the hell out of the local town, the mountain with a hole in the top disappearing into the distance. To an extent, Worlds in the Making is a voyeuristic undertaking since we, through the artists, are watching the scientists at work, their labs, their equipment, we’re observing the observers, and on the soundtrack listening to their observations.

Interspersed with this, Semiconductor employ one of the richest of new art-forms, computer animation, to imagine what the scientists can’t observe. The formation of crystals below the surface forcing themselves into being (in shots reminiscent of the kryptonite effects in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns) and the exterior landscape itself vibrating, with as the accompanying literature describes “sound functions as physical material, becoming a tool to introduce time and motion to the seemingly static world”. Throughout, real seismic data is used as the basis for an audio soundscape blasting from six channels placing us directly inside this formation’s deadly power.

World In The Making brings to mind another childhood television memory from when a pre-teen me was absent from school with chicken pox and was confronted with advanced chemistry for the first time through the scientific programmes broadcast on Granada in the morning (parodied later in Look Around You).  These too would intercut footage of scientific investigation with animations portraying the chemical reactions which with my young eyes could just as well have been fiction, a version of Clarke’s third law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think that’s what Jarman and Gerhardt are also attempting here.

For its slender running time, as you can see, Semiconductors is rich in meaning and ripe for interpretation and I’m becoming very conscious that I’m reaching the point of spoiling the experience if you’re intending to visit (especially since the exhibition hasn’t opened yet). I’d stop reading this paragraph now and skip the next one too because there was just one more thing (Peter Falk RIP). There’s a moment when on one screen the metallic cylindrical seismometer flickers indicating the impending eruption and on another screen, a sculpture of a volcano is shown (in the local town which is called Volcano), as the speakers rumble ominously.

This is a classic film editing trick, often seen in Hitchcock, Spielberg and indeed most disaster films, a cutaway from whatever human drama is being conducted inside the mayhem to a subtle warning about the impending natural disaster. There might even have been a similar shot in Earthquake, just before the dam breaks. I congratulated the artists on this and asked them (in my usual rambling style) if they’d intended to produce a thriller.  Interestingly, although they’d shot unused footage of safety shelters and the like, and wanted to produce an uneasily feeling, it hadn’t cross their mind to go further. But they agreed that if it was a thriller, it was inadvertent rather than by design.

Upstairs in Gallery 2, the Inferno Observatory installation offers a lo-fi version of the “main” work. Whilst researching at the Mineral Science Lab at the Smithsonian, the artists stumbled upon an archive of 16mm footage of volcanologists in the field, including spectacular aeroplane footage of an eruption. The former appears on CRT televisions piled up throughout the space, the latter rightly given the big screen treatment it deserves and as the artists suggest despite the formal, cold, clean space, the visitor, now surrounded by the images and sound once again feels an eruption at a visceral level. I may even have sweated.

There’s an even greater sense of danger here. Whereas the predominantly young people in Worlds in the Making make their observations from a relatively safe distance, these older guys are, like Simon Groom, imperilling limbs as they take readings directly from the lava using very long sticks.  We’re always aware that the pilot and camera man had to have been risking their lives to get so close to the lip of the volcano, especially when the plane swoops heart-stoppingly closer to get a better shot.  The sounds we hear too are natural, taken from directly nearby, instead of the artificially generated noise that accompanies the work downstairs.

On your way out, don’t forget, as I almost did, to visit the ScienceFun Fair in the Media Lounge, in which kids from Pleasant Street Primary School in collaboration with artist Laura Pullig have created some objects/experiments exploring the themes of the exhibition. The seismometer is especially ingenious. It’s enough to make me ponder once again why, having watched Groom singeing his corduroys as he showed me the volcano, I still turned around and followed the educational art stream. Perhaps like Semiconductor, I’m just as interested in the presentation of the natural world, as the natural world itself.