Semiconductor offer new vantage points on solar system with film show at Phoenix

Exhibition: Semiconductor – Solar Systems, Phoenix, Brighton, until October 16 2011

It’s been a good year for Semiconductor. Phoenix has just opened their "first major show in the South East for four years". And up at FACT they are still enjoying what is described as their “first major UK solo show". How that works isn’t clear.

However the Brighton duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt did say that time was an "elastic form" in this interview with Culture24. And in the works on display in Solar Systems, they do seem quite happy to bend the fourth dimension.

Most obvious is the time lapse spellbinder Heliocentric. This 30-minute film lets you do the impossible and stare at the sun. A camera tracks it across a range of skies, from a cityscape to forest and, in perhaps the most significant sequence, an eco bubble.

Sound design is a key part of their work - in this case, some electronica-styled music of the spheres. The track comes into the foreground as it responds to passing clouds and obstructions; it appears to emanate from the sun.

After watching Heliocentric for a while, the novelty of a speeding sun recedes and, bearing the title in mind, it becomes possible to view the distant star as a fixed point and your own vantage point as a precarious spinning one. This brings home what scientists have told us since Copernicus, but which is still useful to see for yourself.

Next door, Black Rain offers another novel perspective. This time we look out from a STEREO satellite, using a Heliospheric Imager, to take in the sight of Coronal Mass Ejections heading towards Earth. Once again, the invisible becomes visible.

CME looks at times like a snowstorm in the night sky. At other times, lens flare will erase the picture. Plus - and this might be fanciful - a static-filled soundtrack sounds like sands of time running out; our solar system is an entropic one, after all.

Strangest of all is the fact that here in deep space is a spectacle we can enjoy every bit as much as the view from a plane or a boat. In fact, it is really bracing up here.

A final piece in the show, Out of the Light, also plays with perspective. This film is projected on the floor and allows you to watch solar eclipses and the transit of Venus.

They play out as shadows across a virtual city and light dancing behind the branches of a tree. It is a rarely seen film and may be the most watchable in the show but it also appears to tell the viewer the least.

Overall, though, this major show in the South East is worth a journey from anywhere in the region. Together with digital culture agency Lighthouse, Phoenix has staged it well, creating three black box spaces and a slick new foyer painted a fetching shade of green.

Jarman and Gerhardt have studio space attached to this gallery, so you might describe this as a homecoming. That's if you can call anywhere home, on a tiny hurtling planet, buffeted by solar winds, dependent on a dying star 150 million kilometres away.

• Open Wednesday-Sunday 11am-5pm. Admission free.
  
  

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