Gregory's ServerI recently saw an amazing Navajo rug at the National Gallery of Art. It looks abstract at first, but it is a detailed representation of the Intel Pentium processor. Called "Replica of a Chip", it was created in 1994 by Marilou Schultz, a Navajo/Diné weaver and math teacher. Intel commissioned the weaving as a gift to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society. 1/6
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The weaving is not just a Pentium but specifically the P54C revision of the original Pentium. The first Pentium chips were too hot and slow. Intel fixed this by a) moving from 800 nm to 600 nm, b) dropping the voltage from 5V to 3.3V, and c) adding a clock driver that could stop the clock to idle parts of the chip. Intel also added 200,000 transistors to support multiprocessing; circuitry that is visible in the rug. My photo shows the P5 on the left and the smaller P54C on the right. 3/6 Marilou Schultz, the artist, learned weaving as a child and is part of four generations of weavers. She used wool from the Navajo-Churro sheep along with traditional plant dyes. She worked from an Intel photo of the die (shown below) and used the "raised outline" weaving technique to make the borders of chip regions more visible. The lack of symmetry made the project challenging. 4/6 Marilou Schultz also created a weaving "Untitled (Unknown Chip)", 2008. Antoine Bercovici identified it for me as the AMD K6 III processor. These weavings are part of an exhibition "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction". The exhibition is no longer at the National Gallery of Art but will be at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) in November and the Museum of Modern Art (New York) next April. 5/6 For more information on the Pentium weaving, see my latest post: https://www.righto.com/2024/08/pentium-navajo-fairchild-shiprock.html 6/6 @kenshirriff This reminds me of this sequence in the Koyaanisqatsi movie where we’re shown aerial views of a city and then…  @kenshirriff .. this is going to confuse A LOT alien archaeologist species that will come in some millennia to a desert earth and will find "ancient remains" of "human tech" .. and so those legends/rumours/theories will be born ... "Maybe the humans had a knowledge we don't have to create chips using organic materials ?" 😅
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@artandtechnic It must have been an interesting workshop! I see that Marilou Schultz is giving another workshop in October, in Rochester. @kenshirriff @artandtechnic it was an incredibly interesting workshop and I felt really lucky to have the opportunity to attend. Marylou taught it with her sister and we learned how to assemble the upright loom, setup the weft and the basics of weaving.  @lopta @artandtechnic Sorry, the weaving workshop is in Rochester NY. I went looking for an old Nat.Geog. article that showed Navaho women actually making circuit boards for Fairchild Semiconductor, because they could remember the complex patterns.  @kenshirriff I came across this blog post by chance, rapidly emailed it to a bunch of people, and then saw you had a mastodon account so I want to thank you for causing me to email my mother and friends about an interesting thing. @kenshirriff  @kenshirriff I remember my 486DX4-100 being much faster than a P1-75. :]  @tth The TLB is the Translation Lookaside Buffer. It is used for memory management, caching mappings from virtual memory to physical memory. @kenshirriff Has anyone asked the gallery about why it was hung that way, or if they actually know it is backwards? @ancients I asked the artist who wove the rug to see if the backward pattern was intentional. From her perspective, a Navajo rug doesn't have a front or back, and she didn't realize that it made a difference from a hardware perspective. She didn't think it made sense to contact the museum since it was near the end of the exhibition. But maybe I should contact the next museum.  @kenshirriff @ancients please don't spoiler, rather log where it was "right and where it was wrong-sided". Each year at the Christmas market sets up this kind of abomination (inspired by artisanal pyramids driven by the rising gas from candles) and I'm always curious if they attach the electricity right or not, resulting in correct or incorrect rotation.  @kenshirriff @ancients filing a technical bug report on a textile display is next-level  @kenshirriff they don’t have to fix it, but you should totally let them know it’s backwards @kenshirriff This is phenomenal. On another note, thank you for posting this as it has given me an idea of something I can do with leather scraps I generate that are too small for any other project. @kenshirriff the first thing I thought when I saw this photo om in my feed was, "this sort of reminds me of that Pentium chip poster I had on my wall as a kid." Amazing weaving skill. @kenshirriff  @kenshirriff - my wife does Navajo-influenced weaving, about 2 hours a day. I showed her this picture and she said "That's not traditional Navajo weaving" and looked away.  @kenshirriff At first glance, before reading the accompanying text, it looked like some messy bookshelves--books stacked here and there, in variously sized piles. I like technology as much as most people and am fascinated by the inspiration of a computer chip for weaving, but I have loved reading and books since long before I ever touched a computer. So I guess what we see is influenced by what we bring from our own experience. Now I can't help seeing both: INFORMATION. @kenshirriff funny, I saw it and thought it was an abstraction of a full library with a ladder behind a chair and desk piled with books  @kenshirriff another example of cultural misappropriation, like the hoover dam but reversed - it may just be a free for all out there    @kenshirriff There’s an exploitative history to this, as Lisa Nakamura at U Michigan demonstrates. To avoid paying rising labor costs, chip companies in the 60s outsourced manufacturing to the Navajo to benefit from both cheap labor and a racialized ideal of native women with “innate” nimble hands and attention to detail from weaving. When the workers demanded better wages, the company relocated manufacture.  @kenshirriff I came across your blog post about this on Metafilter. Really fascinating, and the weavings are beautiful. Thank you for writing it! @kenshirriff Amazing! Thank you for sharing! This reminds me of the Jacquard machine, a controller for looms that is the predecessor of punch-card computers. Fiber arts and computer science are sibling disciplines! @kenshirriff @kenshirriff Looks a little like launching a Steam game under Wayland and Plasma, which I tried during the weekend @kenshirriff |
The weaving of a Pentium is so accurate that I could label the functional blocks of the processor. Amusingly, the gallery hung the weaving backward. The wrong side is facing outward, so the chip is mirrored. I had to flip the image to make this diagram. 2/6