Christian Fennesz & Charles Atlas + Semiconductor March 15, 2007

Part of Optronica, the hybrid video and music festival.

With the World Premiere at the IMAX of their new collaboration, acclaimed Austrian electronic composer Christian Fennesz and the award-winning filmmaker and video artist Charles Atlas bring to Optronica a very different approach to visual music.

Once described as "the electric guitar severed from cliché and all of its physical limitations, shaping a bold new musical language' Fennesz's densely layered musical compositions are anything but sterile computer experiments, having an inherent naturalism, evocative of light, texture and atmosphere. His most recent albums Endless Summer (2001) and Venice (2004) achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim.

Atlas meanwhile, has created work for film, theatre, television and such prestigious museums as the Whitney in NY and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris. A pioneer of the integration of live video with stage performance, Atlas is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with choreographers, dancers and performers such as Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, Merce Cunningham and more recently with New York band Antony and the Johnsons on the audiovisual performance Turning. Atlas is the recipient of three Bessie (New York Dance and Performance) Awards and was recently presented with the prestigious John Cage Award 2006, by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Semiconductor make art works which reveal our physical world in flux; cities in motion, shifting landscapes and systems in chaos. As forces of nature come into play on our surroundings, we witness events unfolding over thousands of years well beyond our lifespan, or outside the limits of human perception.

Since 1999 UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt have been exploring many processes of digital animation to produce moving image works and live animation performances. Central to these works is the role of sound, which becomes synonymous with the image, as it creates, controls and deciphers it; exploring resonance, through the natural order of things. Finely crafted digital work is combined with analogue processes that tailor the randomness
and errors within computer systems as co-conspirator.

Semiconductor have recently returned home to Brighton, after completing a series of fellowships at: The NASA Space Sciences Laboratories (UC Berkeley, California USA), Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship (Berwick-Upon-Tweed, UK) and Couvent des Récollets (Paris, France). Past and future exhibitions include: Venice Biennale, Prague Contemporary Art Festival, ICA London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Careof Gallery in Milan, EMAF Osnabruck and Beaconsfield Gallery London.

Semiconductor are currently working on an Animate! commission and will release a new DVD, Worlds in Flux, with Fat Cat Records early 2007.

Official Website: http://www.optronica.org/index2.html