The Pluralities of Scale
In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.
For centuries, these words about how God made the heavens and the earth—you probably know them better in English—were accessible only via those who claimed to speak for Him. Painstakingly copied by monks in the most beautiful lettering, the scripture of the Catholic Church spread across Western Europe in Latin, a language not understood or read by the masses in thrall to Rome’s power. It wasn’t until the 1440s, when the Gutenberg press allowed for the spread of translated and mass-printed copies of the bible, that the Vatican’s grasp loosened enough for God’s words to fall into people’s own hands.
The printing press’s advent set off a revolution of mass communication, one that arguably enabled those wanting to demystify Christianity to post and spread their own beliefs. In 1517, the story goes, Maarten Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Though it remains unclear whether nails or church doors were actually involved, Luther’s ideas were reprinted, translated, and spread throughout Germany and Europe, their publication retroactively heralded as the birth of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s words diminished the power of the Catholic church, while solidifying the power technology has over us.
The Mariënburg chapel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, was built at the cusp of this Printing Revolution in 1431. Nearly 500 years later, the Dutch semiconductor company, Philips, opened its first factory a mere stone's throw away. For six weeks late last year, the chapel housed Pluralities of Scale, an experimental exhibit on the birth of a technology that, half a millennium after the printing press, set off another revolution of mass communication: the microchip.
A former Catholic chapel may seem like an odd place for a microchip exhibit. Religion and science tend to be positioned at opposite ends of the human experience: one pointing towards a higher meaning of life, the other to its earthly realities. Yet both are born of our desire to make sense of what exists beyond us and what resonates within.
Curated by Florian van Zandwijk and Martijn van Boven of Stichting LINK, born from a non-profit collaboration between NXP and the Design Art Technology department at ArtEZ School for the Arts, the Pluralities of Scale exhibit sought to bring the history of microchips to life through a multifocal lens, using never-before-seen archival documents, stories of former Philips/NXP employees, and contemporary works of art. Returning to the physical place where Philips/NXP helped birth the international semiconductor industry, the exhibit invited visitors to contemplate how a technology that can seem invisible became integral to nearly every social process in contemporary life, penetrating the very fabric of society—from geopolitics to art and aesthetics, to how we understand our very selves.
In this holy space, the microchip’s history and meaning were recontextualized, widening the lens to include a more philosophical exploration rather than a mere technological one.
After all, over the span of roughly five decades, the microchip has reached its smallest physical iteration yet, while attaining an undeniable omnipresence. It is a testament to the fact that the miniscule and expansive can exist in the same space, one begging to be opened up and explored through the lens of human wonder.
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The exhibit opened by unearthing, as it were, the technology’s most basic element: sand. To be precise, an incredibly quartz-rich sand found in only a few places. One of which is the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
Closed off to outsiders by gates, guards, and protocols, endless miles of sandy white mines etch serpentine lines through the sides of the Appalachian Mountains. The quartz-rich sand mined here is what integrated circuits and semiconductors are made from. On a big screen near the exhibit’s entrance, a YouTube video titled “One of America's Most Significant Mines - Unimin - Spruce Pine NC” played on loop. In a heavy Carolinian accent, local enthusiast Tony Lee Glenn offered a rhapsodic digital tour of the mines, stringing together Google Maps satellite images, heavily zoomed-in videos shot during his lunch breaks, and screen recordings of the mining company’s website.
“I don’t want to overstate this,” Glenn began before divulging a slew of facts, “but I just want people to understand, this is like a crazy cool mine.” He went on to talk about the microchip-making process, his father’s years at the mineral research lab, and his own stint crushing barrels from Spruce Pine during college. Using technologies ultimately made possible by that mine—satellites, computers, the Internet—Glenn virtually brought visitors from the Dutch chapel’s exhibit to his hometown 4000 miles away, offering a birds’ eye view of the microchip’s place of birth.
In highly sterilized laboratories, the mined sand goes through a complex process. First, it is refined and melted into 99.9999% pure silicon ingots, which are then sliced into paper thin wafers. These wafers are polished, cleaned, covered in a thin layer of nonconducting silicon dioxide and photoresist, printed with ultraviolet light through various patterned plates or “masks,” and then etched into ever smaller rectangular segments that form the basis of the chips they will become.
Pulled apart into disparate elements and displayed under a glass case—a heap of sand; ragged chunks of silicon; masks in hot pink and deep blue; wafers the size of a human hand; chips the size of phalanges adorned with copper, gold, and silver—this intricate process yields a wide range of relics. Each forms an essential section of what is now a nearly invisible and mysterious source of immense power, yet appears strangely sterile and ordinary by itself: a piece of jewelry, a silver plate, a scoop from a sandbox. It is through a process of technological transubstantiation that these disparate parts attain relevance. After all, a robe is just a robe, a toe simply a toe, until it's understood to hold the power to bring us closer to the divine.
Still, the aim of Pluralities of Scale was never to subscribe saintly powers to the microchip, but rather to strip some of its established power away. Returning to the beginning serves to demystify the now: to re-establish the microchip as a physical object created by human hands, not a mysterious and unworldly thing that connects us to the cloud.
It is exactly this human touch that has become so painfully absent over time. The artist Ingrid Burrington, in her essay titled, "Sand In The Gears," contemplated this dynamic: “For all the alchemy and labor that make iPhones appear untouched by human hands, at the end of the day all digital devices are just a bunch of slowly accumulated rocks, refined with chemicals and petroleum.”
The microchip’s physical origins are replete with traces of human touch, even human failure. In the chapel, shining silicon ingots, cast in the desired state of 99.99999% perfection, lay side by side with off-cast versions fading from futuristically smooth to amusingly grotesque. Awash in ridges and fault lines, they cast oily rainbows off of their ragged surface. There is beauty in these mistakes, in missteps made in the search of perfection. But in a process aimed at erasing human faultlines, errors fall to the wayside, are discarded and ultimately erased. They are sacrificed for the sake of creating instruments that in form and function are as predictable as they are “pure.”
A large part of Stichting Link’s collection is sourced from items deemed by former Philips employees to be too interesting, too special, too visually appealing for the trash can. Instead, they took this detritus home, displayed it in their living rooms as art, or simply kept it safe, sensing its value might be reconsidered at a later date. Looking at these pieces now, taken from employees’ homes and now lovingly displayed in the exhibit, they take on the quality of mid-century Dutch art. Framed and elegantly layered in order of size, a collection of wafers becomes an original Bauhaus; plastic sheets or “masks” in magenta, teal, yellow, and blue used to map out different layers to etch on silicon wafers become a technicolor Mondriaan; and a black-and-white blueprint of a semiconductor from the 1960s becomes a satellite view of the stream-lined modernist architecture by Willem Dudok.
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It is no coincidence that the Catholic Church constructed lavish buildings and filled them to the brim with gold, jewels, stained glass, sculptures, and paintings, and that the Protestant Revolution initiated a wave of iconoclasm intent to destroy it all. Art can bridge time and space by actualizing the invisible. The Sistine Chapel was meant to return Rome and the Catholic Church to its former glory in 1482. Its ceilings, 60 feet over the chapel’s floor, continue to cast their spell over 25,000 daily visitors who are perhaps less impressed by Michelangelo’s art than by the knowledge that man created it.Â
Artistic genius ultimately manifests in the fallible human body, one that bends and strains to reach the farthest edge of the mind’s imagination. Michelangelo, who refused to paint lying down, spent four years straining his head and hands on a curved scaffolding of his own making to paint the chapel’s ceiling. He later recounted the experience, writing “my haunches are grinding into my guts. My spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.”Â
I recalled these words while standing before a 5.6 x 16 foot construction drawing in Pluralities of Scale, which depicted a segment of a 100 Hz television 'Octoplus' microchip from 1982. The drawing was made by Harry Veendrick and Leo Pfennings with felt tip pens, colored and graphite pencils, and pressure-sensitive tape.
In a nearby black-and-white picture, Veendrick and Pfennings knelt on top of the unfinished drawing. A cigarette lighter and a pack of fresh tobacco lay next to a 1960s coffee thermos, its circular stains still darkly dotted across the squiggly pencil lines and numbers on the actual sheet, forever indicating where new connections should be made and circuits placed, some half erased or scratched out, recalculated or corrected.
Hung at the center of the Mariënburg chapel, in the exact spot where the pulpit would have been, the paper became a stained glass window, a religious tapestry, that intuitively pulled the gaze up to its figurative and literal magnificence. Only an eighth of the full design, it is a testament to the human labor behind the microchip’s development. It is also, most likely, the last item of its kind. This fragility underlines how, before the microchip was a thing made of sand and metal—pressed and polished, etched and cut—it was a thought, an idea. It was then shaped, sharpened and patented in the U.S., in 1959, by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyse, two engineers in Texas who dubbed their invention the miniaturized electronic and silicon-based integrated circuit.
Kilby and Noyse’s idea quickly spread and found fertile ground on foreign shores, including in the Netherlands, with Philips. Founded in 1891 by Frederik and his son Gerard Philips, the Philips company set out "to manufacture light bulbs and other electro-technical articles, as well as to trade therein," as it noted in a local gazette. Sixty years later, its midcentury owners suspected this new electro-technical article could offer Philips a shiny future, and they opened their first semiconductor factory in Nijmegen in 1953. But as potent ideas also always do, they also required people and labor to become reality.
For her interactive work, People behind machines (2023), artist Alina Lupu took black-and-white photographs from the Philips archive and allowed visitors to connect to the people who first made the microchip personally, placing the ones that spoke to them most onto a temporary wall.
Aside from an obvious tale of technological development, these photographs also tell the story of the social and professional advancement that the microchip made possible. Philips offered its employees a generous pension plan. The plant hired hundreds of women, who weaved the chips’ delicate metal connections with nimble hands. Employees were offered in-house training and education, allowing young working class employees to expand their knowledge and climb the corporate ladder. Even before it took over the world, the microchip changed people’s lives.
But as the microchip grew physically smaller, its business grew bigger, with jobs increasingly automated, and many of these people literally disappeared from the picture.
In Lupu’s work, smiling office workers at parties and picnics mingling with their bosses—or rows of women streaming out of the factory or sitting behind long white tables—seamlessly bleed into close-cropped images of disembodied gloved hands directing metal constructions, or masked faces staring into black screens, until all that is left are abstract pictures of machinery.
Lenses that could trace lines and mistakes at microscopic levels replaced fallible human sight. Pixels replaced pencils, simulations replaced sketches. Female fingers that once knit metal wires together were replaced by robotic ones. Progress equates replacement, until all that remains is the memory.
“In the beginning there was nothing,” an elderly Dutch man recalls. Weaved together by artist Oscar van Leest in the audio installation Tot 1 GHz kan ik horen (I can hear up to 1 GHz) (2023), the recollections of eight former Philips employees who helped develop the microchip tell the story of the technology’s early years. Despite experiencing the moments they describe decades ago, their voices still contain the boyish enthusiasm with which they began their jobs as 19 and 20-year-olds in the 1950s and ’60s. “You could do anything you could think of and pull anything off the shelves that you wanted,” one remembers, his amazement still tingeing his words. Another admits to taking items home so that he could keep tinkering: “I’d still be working on things on Sunday, 2 am in the morning. I was completely possessed.”
But despite their immediate recognition of the microchip’s potential, none of these men realized this technology would revolutionize the world. They weren’t driven by a desire to be remembered as pioneers, or to change the future. What kept them going was the sheer joy of creating, learning, and expanding on what was considered possible.
Contemplating how the microchip had evolved since his career’s start, one of them even confessed that he cannot fathom how the microchip has evolved over time. The processes he helped design had become so complex, and advanced so rapidly, that not even his hands or mind—present at the microchip’s creation—could continue to grasp them.
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We invent things then we invent meaning, then we forget we invented anything at all. The new thing becomes the rule, and the rule becomes law.
It was in 1965 that Gordon Moore, the co-founder of the Fairchild Semiconductor laboratory and of Intel, observed that technological advancement and capitalism together seemed to generate a doubling of an integrated circuit’s transistors every two years, while the cost of those circuits halved in that same timespan. And sure enough: 16 Bit became 32 bit became 64 bit became 128 bit, and the observation of one man became the market’s expectation, which became known as Moore’s Law.
The microchips that run our computers and phones today are the size of a fingernail; the billions of transistors that cover their surfaces are smaller than a blood cell or a strand of human DNA. And companies continue to reach towards the limits of Moore’s law, creating technologies to go even smaller, even faster. The question of how small we can go has come to overshadow other questions, such as how we got here in the first place, and at what gains and costs.
A Dutch company named ASM International, now ASML, joined with Philips in 1983 to take on microchips’ growing market and to realize the capital and technology required to produce ever-smaller semiconductors. By then, Philips’ headquarters had moved to the Dutch city of Eindhoven. ASML’s first employees worked begrudgingly from wooden barracks next to Philips’ offices. Today its tens of thousands of employees, from all over the world, go to work each day at ASML’s sprawling headquarters, close to where those wooden barracks stood, and 45 miles from where the first Dutch microchip builders began their enterprise.
As microchips decreased in size and multiplied in their potential at immense speeds, the production process sped along with it. Along with dreams of what the microchip could do—and the money that could be made—all scales turned global. Production quickly outgrew the initial factories’ boundaries, as well as the cities and countries in which they stood. The microchip’s future was debated in new languages, in offices and boardrooms across the world. It brought nations together and split them apart, as the origin of the microchip became less compelling than what it promised to bring.
Microchips brought us color television, portable calculators, computers, hearing aids, mobile phones, GPS, video games. They launched rockets into space and missiles into homes. They enabled wars, coups, and genocides that now pass swiftly beneath our fingers with the same ease, the same strokes, the same format as updates on the weather or a note from a loved one.
Today’s battles for the future of microchips, we’re often told, pit the U.S. against China. But as a crucial player in their manufacture, ASML still wields great power in this race, using extreme ultraviolet light to fashion circuitry on nanoscale. Like the microchip itself, the company’s power is more felt than seen. But the history of the microchip, which continues to run through the Netherlands in key ways, remains a human one.
By returning to that history’s beginning, we’re reminded that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, no matter how small that coin becomes. Moments that alter our present tend to silently disappear in the future’s shadow. They hide in the folds of eras that precede and succeed them, growing increasingly out of focus, ultimately assigned to the wrong person or date. As technology seeps silently into ever-more corners of our lives, it blends in with what we deem natural. We connect ourselves to machines to disconnect from reality, or alternately to record it, share it, and make sense of it.
The closer we are intertwined with the microchip, the less we attempt to understand it. And while its applications expand beyond our general comprehension, we shape our fear of uncertainty into dystopian imaginings of the future, in which microchips are involuntarily implanted into our bloodstreams or its technology gains unprecedented control over us.
Sometimes, we must return to the start—the sands we rose from—to regain our sense of control. After all, everything we create contains a human scale, one that allows us to connect with our surroundings, both visible and invisible. In revisiting the microchip’s origin, we peel back its layers to find patterns of meaning, beauty, play, connection, construction, destruction, and dreams. We discover our own humanity. Returning to the beginning of things takes us from the cloudy heavens back to earth, letting us watch the seed curl back into what it once was—materialized potential, small enough to fit in a human palm.♦
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