The computer microchip is the most complex mass-produced device in human history. A critical step in fabricating this technology shaping the future is photolithography, a process that stems directly from the development of photography and optical principles dating back centuries. In 1827, the French engineer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce developed the first photoresist to fix an image of the world using sunlight and the principles of a camera obscura. He named this heliography, or "sun drawing." In the mid-twentieth century, the computer industry transformed Niépce’s heliography into photolithography. Not to capture images, but to produce microchips. Today the science of optics is used to build calculating machines capable of rendering an image of the world without needing to see it. Niépce’s heliograph from the industrial age is an antecedent to Donna Haraway’s microchip made of sunshine at the turn of the information age. “The new machines are so clean and light,” she wrote in 1985, “their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society.” Decades into the reality of this dream, computational technologies can now generate imagery that can pass as seemingly indistinguishable from that of a camera. As this new image world grows richer, the danger of falling into a virtual elsewhere grows with it. Yet there is no elsewhere. Every image from an uncanny world somewhere else fundamentally alters our world right before our eyes.

Trailer

excerpt