Commissioned by Animate Projects in association with Arts Council England, Magnetic Movie was created by artists Ruth Jarmen and Joe Gerhardt, also known as, Semiconductor.

The film follows Scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describing their discoveries while the animation of Jarmne and Gerhardt bring to life their descriptions with visualizations of the magnetic life all around us. One scientist describes a field as a ‘hairy ball’ with ingrown hairs that turn back towards the source creating loops. Another scientist describes another field as ‘dancing dots’ that collide canceling out or merging with each other.

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

Magnetic field lines shown by iron filings

Magnetic Visualizations

Magnetic fields are largely invisible though some good examples of visualization exisit, such as: Auroras, in which visible streaks of light line up with the local direction of Earth’s magnetic field (due to plasma particle dipole interactions). In these phenomena, lines or curves appear that follow along the direction of the local magnetic field. Another, placing iron fillings in a magnetic field will cause them to correlate themselves in the lines of the field.

In 1744 a simple experiment was conducted in Sweden to reproduce the underlying cause of the Aurora Borealis in a laboratory, what we would now think of as a room. A small hole in a shade “the size of a large pea” let through a ray of sunlight that then was refracted through a prism. The small patch of light broken into a spectrum of colours then traveled through a medium of turbulent air directly above a warmed glass of aquavit. The resulting image landed on a screen a few short feet away and looked like what was seen dancing in the sky on many long Swedish nights, nature’s sublime entertainment in the real pre-history of cinema.

The experiment concluded that the aurora was caused by a refraction of light through volatile vapors. Straining a rainbow through drunken air may have not proved to be most scientifically accurate recreation of the Aurora Borealis, but it was the “very most beautiful thing that can be arranged in a dark room…flashing beams shoot suddenly up and then transform into colored veils, endlessly changing position between themselves, the one against the other.” The shift in magnitude from the scale of the earth to a miniature in the laboratory was no doubt greased by the remaining aquavit left undedicated to the pursuit of science.

With Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have tapped into a new and ancient aesthetic of turbulence. We can hear it in the sounds of natural radio-naturally-occurring electromagnetic signals from the earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere-that course through Magnetic Movie, at times animating the animation, a quick nervous response condensed into static. The sound itself is the product of the combined turbulences of the earth’s molten core, weather systems and electrical storms, ephemeral ionization in the upper atmosphere, and the solar winds. What we hear is underscored with complex and supple orders, in fact, too complex and supple to be ordered. We already have experience of them in the tangible turbulence of water and the crazy convection of fluids combining, tongues of fire and the thermal afterthought of smoke, the ribbons of clouds stiffly blown twisted up a hill. The flux championed by Hericlitus that has awed audiences since antiquity.

Images and quoted text from Semiconductor: Magnetic Movie