Work from 2024

       In 2024, I acquired a series of images of 2022 chips. These recent digital images were etched using solar plates. (In contrast, earlier plates I created starting in 1996 were either on copper or manufacturing prototypes). I have superimposed these 2022 chip images on top of my quarter century older prototype plates to explore new ways of visualizing miniaturization and processing power. Both the new and the old are termed ‘intaglio’ prints. Each is a monoprint: there are no multiples in the 2023 and 2024 works. Old looking documents in the work, are original – not digital copies. I can tell you where each was acquired (family photos, books, letters).
       The images of the new chip I am using was manufactured in Taiwan for Apple around 2022.  Every line that our human eyes see on these new prints is magnified thousands of times. Their actual width is not visible to the naked eye, more than one-hundred times smaller than a human hair.
      At first, I was perplexed because the characteristic boxes and lines from my 28-year old plates was replaced on the new images by squiggles and puddles. The metals and silicon oxide look somewhere between static and liquid, and as the digital image portrays them, created using a scanning electron microscope, the confluence of metals appears to our eyes as rivulets of flowing water or sap trickling down a tree.  To reveal the ‘artwork’ of the chip, several layers are exposed in my images.
          They are compelling as artworks: as metaphors for the speed at which computers are influencing and managing our digital lives. Soon, we’ll shorten that phrase to ‘our lives’.