The Pluralities of Scale

Even microchips have a history that’s human.

Originally published in Pioneer Works' Broadcast, October 2, 2024

Colored masks for printing microchip layers, 2023.

Photo: Florian van Zandwijk

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

For centuries, these words about how God made the heavens and the earth—you probably know them better in English—were accessible only via those who claimed to speak for Him. Painstakingly copied by monks in the most beautiful lettering, the scripture of the Catholic Church spread across Western Europe in Latin, a language not understood or read by the masses in thrall to Rome’s power. It wasn’t until the 1440s, when the Gutenberg press allowed for the spread of translated and mass-printed copies of the bible, that the Vatican’s grasp loosened enough for God’s words to fall into people’s own hands.

The printing press’s advent set off a revolution of mass communication, one that arguably enabled those wanting to demystify Christianity to post and spread their own beliefs. In 1517, the story goes, Maarten Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Though it remains unclear whether nails or church doors were actually involved, Luther’s ideas were reprinted, translated, and spread throughout Germany and Europe, their publication retroactively heralded as the birth of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s words diminished the power of the Catholic church, while solidifying the power technology has over us.

The Mariënburg chapel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, was built at the cusp of this Printing Revolution in 1431. Nearly 500 years later, the Dutch semiconductor company, Philips, opened its first factory a mere stone’s throw away. For six weeks late last year, the chapel housed Pluralities of Scale, an experimental exhibit on the birth of a technology that, half a millennium after the printing press, set off another revolution of mass communication: the microchip.

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