refractal

May we first start with a passage from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “The limits of state action” (1810):

Now man never regards that which he possesses as so much his own, as that which he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…

In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, into men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their enjoyments.

It does seem to be, in a most tragic way, this very idea of the human as a beautiful and nearly impossible consequence of a mysterious cosmic chemistry that is concealed and denied so very profoundly in modern life. It is therefore always a sincere pleasure to see instances of workers surreptitiously inserting an expression of themselves into work that is otherwise supposed to conform to a contractually predetermined sterility.

I came across two examples presented here: that of concealed sculptural ornamentation on New York City highrises built during the 1920s-1930s and that of chipart, or invisible icons included by semiconductor engineers on the various chips that they worked on. Both of these examples seemed to fit nicely under the heading of lithography, although under rather different usages of the word. (Lithography as “stone writing” and as the chemical process by which semiconductors are fabricated).

Part 1. Skyscrapers

This first set of images comes from an October 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix [PDF] which was sourced from the very marvelous Modern Mechanix blog.

The above picture, described in the magazine as a janitor who is “in his natural state, sound asleep”. Despite this rather snarky reading of the image by the article’s author, does it not rather seem that the bespectacled janitor, with a book on his lap, and a finger perched upon his chin, is privately considering some story or poem he may have just read?

Left: “The modern girl, with a cigarette and a cane is found perched on the fourth floor of a New York building in a niche where no one was told to place her”((((how scandalous))) Right: “The man may be the grasping landlord, for he has a big bag of money which he is putting away in a safe” ((((excellent deduction Watson!)))

Left: “On one of New York City’s most modern skyscrapers, appears a carved figure of a lone fisherman. No one seems to know the meaning of it nor why its there” Right: “Directly opposite the figure of this boy with a pea shooter is a grouchy old man”

Part 2: Chipscrapers

Chip art, or chip graffiti, refers to the practice by semiconductor designers of including personalized tags or iconography on the chips that they design. To get a sense of where this happens, see the zoom in below:

The microprocessor chip (left) as it appears on the screen should appear roughly the same size as it would in real life. If you have ever seen a circuit board, this chip would be one of the squares or rectangles covered in black plastic.

The practice of including art in chip designs experienced its golden age in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, in contrast to the contemporary practice and ethos of semic design, the entire design cycle was managed by a single team of engineers who became very invested in the integrated design of a chip (now modular design practices split the development across different groups of engineers and library’s of preexisting schematics). This change has led to a deemphasis of a certain engineer or group of engineers being motivated to tag their chips because it feels, in some ways, less so their own. Coupling with this almost Fordist change of events, increased pressure for tight time lines and rapid turn around has further braked, but by no means silenced, the practice of chip art.

”We all did it,” said Dan Zuras, a chip designer at Hewlett-Packard. ”Eighteen or 20 years ago, they were all over the place.”

Designs were usually etched into the upper metallic layers of the chip, creating the impression of an image in relief on the surface. The cartoons grew out of the ritual of having chip designers sign or initial chips they had worked on. For example, Mr. Zuras drew a Roadrunner on a then-fast Hewlett-Packard 1AK9 chip in 1982. ”Back in those days, I knew where every one of the 153,000 transistors were on the chip,” he said. ”I knew it so well that I signed it, like writing your name in wet concrete after you’ve poured a driveway.” [via 1999 NYT article]

For the most part, up until the 1990s, these doodles fell beneath the radar of semiconductor corporate management and therefore did not invite too much scrutiny. However, after a few mishaps occurred–flaking from one caused a short circuit in a design, a very expensive accident–much stricter controls were imposed on designers including more intensive error checking programs. Even so, if a group of engineers can get their design past the checking programs, then for the most part companies will not make too much of a stink. However, there is a bit of cultural variation on this account: no one has found examples of chip art on Japanese chips, but it seems to be reasonably common on European and most American designs.

It is important to take note that most of the knowledge about chip art is fundamentally coincidentally and may in fact largely slip away into oblivion. There are two main sources who have been systematically discovering and publishing examples of chip art. Without their efforts, the stories of these artifacts would be largely forgotten as the engineering cliques that they helped cement die off, leaving only the archeologists to wonder over them in the future.

Skimming like Google Terra-nauts across the surface of integrated circuits are Chipworks, a company that does reverse engineering on integrated circuits for intellectual property disputes and the Molecular Expression Lab, run by Mike Davidson, who spend lots of time aiming high powered microscopes at all sorts of things from metorites to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

This sailboat, from a 1970s Texas Instrument chip, is the earliest example of chip artwork found so far.

A chip used in Digital Equipment’s MicroVax 3000 and 6200 minicomputers carries a message in Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet: “VAX–when you care enough to steal the very best.” The message was intended for technicians on the other side of the Cold War who might try to reverse-engineer the VAX designs by looking closely at the originals.

Appearing as an opposed duet of helmeted gladiators, these angry silicon soldiers were discovered on the surface of an image sensor used by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers sent to probe the Red planet.

From Mike Davidson at the Molecular Expression Lab: “We caught this silicon version of Waldo (that is about 30 microns in size) hiding among caches, buses, and registers while searching through many thousands of square microns of complex circuitry with a high-power optical microscope. Waldo is the first Silicon Creature that we discovered, and this led to an exhaustive search for more creatures and construction of the Silicon Zoo gallery.”