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Ken Shirriff

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

The Pentium rug next to an Intel photo of the Pentium die. I flipped the rug image to match the die. The die photo has very bright reds, greens, and other colors. The rug has the identical pattern but with muted traditional colors.
1 September at 16:19 | Open on oldbytes.space
14 comments
Ken Shirriff

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

A Navajo rug representing an AMD processor chip. This weaving has large rectangular regions. The colors include bright red, two shades of blue, and green.
1 September at 16:20 | Open on oldbytes.space
Ken Shirriff
Badibulgator

@kenshirriff This reminds me of this sequence in the Koyaanisqatsi movie where we’re shown aerial views of a city and then…

youtu.be/RSINqSvSVyM?t=350

1 September at 16:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Giles Goat

@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 ?" 😅

1 September at 16:57 | Open on toot.wales
[DATA EXPUNGED]
Ken Shirriff

@artandtechnic It must have been an interesting workshop! I see that Marilou Schultz is giving another workshop in October, in Rochester.

1 September at 18:36 | Open on oldbytes.space
Lucienne Kennedy

@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.

1 September at 19:15 | Open on mastodon.social
lopta
Roy Brander

@kenshirriff

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.
But I think that was the 1970s article "The Computer", and what I still have is the 1982 issue on "The Chip", and it contributes this semi-relevant picture.
"Semi", because that's NOT a rug, but a model; it's how they had to review chip designs before you could do CAD zoom-ins.
2 September at 0:40 | Open on urbanists.social
Passepartout

@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.

2 September at 1:11 | Open on mastodon.online
.:. brainsik
KCRouth 🍻

@kenshirriff
this is so cool. I posted it separately before seeing your posting here. I love reading your articles and following your projects.

2 September at 15:46 | Open on triangletoot.party
seismo!allegra!utzoo

@kenshirriff sure looks like Death Cab for Cutie album cover from 2008.

1 September at 17:48 | Open on mastodon.social
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