Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Chipscapes: Art Made From Microchips”.
I’M steve emery, i’m a artist i make chipscapes i make chipscapes, which are artworks made from computer chips. I do research on the history of the chips and the business conditions that they were under and try to tell a compelling story about them. Well, i started collecting chips and it was sort of like high-tech bottle cap collecting, and i had a lot of friends and family that were concerned about me, and so i started doing the artwork as a way of sharing, even with lay people uh about the technology And the interesting things about chips. Well, most most the time when people are um looking at computer chips, they don’t realize that inside the the package, there’s actually the chip which is made from silicon and to actually see what they look like. You have to be able to open up the uh, the the package that it’s in or you have to get a hold of a silicon wafer, which is where it came from in the first place, i’ve traded with people all over the world for different wafers. I’Ve gone to surplus places, ham fests any place that has any technology whatsoever.
That’S where i go to see if i can find some of this stuff well, so my favorite right now is the uh. I have some stuff around the intel 4004, which was the very first microprocessor uh, that his birthday is actually november 15th of this year and it’ll be 50 years old, so microprocessors have been around for that long, the one that you’re looking at right now. This is the intel 4004 package and i have an x-ray kind of picture here, so you can actually see the chip inside this package and then this is a a picture of the actual chip die.
That shows the detail of it and then down here. I have another version: uh, it’s a smaller version, a little bit less expensive, and then i have another one over here that has the 4004 plus the other three chips that were created at the same time to support it and the bottom one down here actually has A chip die and it uses a ceramic version of it, and otherwise it’s uh. It has the same uh image. How do you light up for me? Three, okay, so the so the people that are most interested in uh.
My artworks typically are not engineers, because engineers view this stuff as just the tools of their trade, [ Applause ], the people that are most uh interested are generally teachers, uh software engineers, because they don’t really understand the hardware really well uh that actually powers the work. The code that they write so um, i would say the majority of the of my customers fall into that category. So one of the things that i try to do with chipscapes is: i do a lot that are technical kind of portraits about chips, but i also try to open it up and do interesting, even fun things so, like i make computer bugs and in those i Try to describe the different kind of software bugs that people run into, and i make a physical representation.
That’S a little bit fantastical just to help kind of share the technology with with people who might not otherwise be interested. I do the same thing with christmas, ornaments and jewelry. Trying to you know, reach a broader audience. Oh boy, the hardest part of this is actually maintaining my collection. I have about 40 000 chips and so being able to sort through them and deciding which ones i’m going to use for artworks, which ones will be interesting.
That’S the hard part you can find out about chipscapes at chipscapes.com. That’S like a landscape, but just chipped. So chip escapes you .