A ‘kilogirl’ is a material unit that for a short time in the mid-twentieth century measured computer power, based on the women whose work underpinned the computers’ operations. A ‘kilogirl’ represents the computer power of 1,000 women doing one hours’ worth of work. The collective Superkilogirls researches the material infrastructures of computing, its entanglement with women’s labour, and how the historical marginalisation of these efforts reverberate now.

Superkilogirls tracks the contraction of computing infrastructures, from weaving machines, mainframes, and switchboards, to the invention of the transistor and related semiconductor industries. The project challenges narratives about computing’s seeming dematerialisation through centralising narratives about its globally fragmented labour. Superkilogirls works from a speculative framework, operating from the premise that the way technology has developed was not inevitable and centralising the human scale of computing.

Superkilogirls is a collaboration between Camila Galaz (USA), Ana Meisel (UK) and Lua Vollaard (NL). Camila and Ana together host Our Friend the Computer, a podcast exploring alternative computing histories mostly gone unresearched in the western discourse of computing.

What if the Kilogirl had persevered as a unit of measurement?

And what if that labor had been valued?

Machinery, [...] operates only by means of associated labour, or labour in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labour-process is, in the latter case, a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labour itself.

– Karl Marx, Capital Volume One

She thinks about everything at once without making a mistake. No one has figured out how to keep her from doing this thinking while her hands and nerves also perform every delicate complex function of the work. this is not automatic or deadening. Try it sometime. Make your hands move quickly on the keys fast as you can, while you are thinking about: the layers, fossils. The idea that this machine she controls is simply layers of human work hours frozen in steel, tangled in tiny circuits, blinking out through lights like hot, red eyes.

– Karen Brodine, Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking, 1990

“Mend your speech a little,
Lest it may mar your fortune.”[1]
—Shakespeare

In the telecommunications industry's early years, before the widespread use of automatic dialing systems, the role of the switchboard operator was not just a job but a choreographed interaction between human and machine. In thinking through histories of technological labor, I spent April exploring the history of female switchboard operators on the United States’ east coast—particularly at the Bell Telephone Company from the 1910s to the 1940s. My interest in this topic has centered not only on the control exerted by the company but also on the spaces in which awareness and autonomy were able to exist for the operators, who were largely framed as components within a vast and meticulously tuned communication machine.

Bell's management of their operators—primarily young, middle-class white women selected for their specific demographic traits—was strategic and comprehensive. The working conditions and community cultures were superficially appealing and appeared to value and appreciate their staff. However, this was, in part, a tactic to attract and retain a specific type of worker deemed ideal for the company operations. The movements of these operators across the switchboards involved constant stretching and reaching, a physical toll that eventually necessitated the establishment of one of the first corporate medical departments in 1913. Any deviation to the established norms of the system—conceptualized as "noise" within the system by researcher Elinor Carmi[2]—was viewed as something that needed to be managed and corrected in order to maintain a seamless operational flow. There was also a fostering of self-regulation and mutual surveillance among operators through programs like "Hear Yourself as Others Hear You", which allowed operators to listen to and evaluate each other’s work.[3]

This control extended to their private time and internal mental lives. The company’s self-development program, "A Design for Living" developed by Dr. Theresa Boden, was introduced officially in 1939 as part of a comprehensive strategy to manage and optimize the lives of their female switchboard operators both at and outside of work. This program, lasting several weeks, was ostensibly designed to enrich the operators' lives, teaching them how to excel not just as employees but as models of societal ideals of womanhood. I managed to find a copy of the “A Design for Living” handbook, in a revised 1950 edition, whose topics include: conversation, better speech, reading, dress and grooming, etiquette, entertainment, home decoration, family and personal budgeting, travel and vacation planning, and hobbies. In-person classes taught by Group Leaders, and counseling services staffed by fellow operators, blurred the lines between support and surveillance. These programs were presented as perks of the job but fundamentally served the company's interest in maintaining a well-oiled and compliant workforce.

Both physical movement and speech were modulated through instruction and drills. In terms of speech, initially operators were scripted to ensure uniformity; however, after a dip in subscribers during the Great Depression and as competition with smaller companies using automatic dialing systems became stronger, there was a change in strategy. Operators were now encouraged to sound more personable and authentic, traits that automated systems could not replicate. This also led to the creation of the Information Service role, where operators transitioned to become sources of information and assistance. These information service operators were tasked with answering inquiries, providing phone numbers, and offering directory assistance, essentially acting as live, interactive databases. The slogan of Bell Telephone during this era (30s-50s) was “The Voice with a Smile”; operators were allowed personalities only insofar as these traits served the company's bottom line.

The physical tools and systems used for the job also began changing. Innovations like the introduction of updated switchboards and later, more sophisticated routing systems, were designed to reduce the physical strain and complexity of connecting calls. However, these enhancements came with increased expectations for productivity with operators expected to handle a higher volume of calls per shift while being monitored for speed and accuracy. These changes, alongside a lack of updated remuneration after World War II, contributed to the nationwide telephone strike in 1947, the largest walkout of women in U.S. history (using the clever slogan “The Voice with a Smile Will be Gone for A While”), which would lead Bell to accelerate its transition to automatic dialing systems. Interestingly, while the "A Design for Living" program had an element of unionization prevention by engaging the operators with continuous activities and providing a sense of fulfillment, it also inadvertently promoted solidarity among them. Encouraging the women to spend time together outside of work allowed them to forge stronger bonds and share personal experiences, which, in turn, strengthened their collective identity and camaraderie.

Bell maintained a labor-intensive approach longer than any other telecommunications company, demonstrating a clear preference for control over cost savings. The shift to automation only occurred when maintaining this control was no longer sustainable. Eventually the switchboards fell silent, signaling the end of an era for the women who had been pivotal to the growth of the industry. The dominance Bell once held over these operators became outdated, as did the detailed manuals, training protocols, and the methods of self-regulation, along with the mental and physical expertise the operators held. But this control had not disappeared; it had merely shifted to the mechanical parts of the machine the operators had once embodied.As we consider the shifting landscapes of labor and technology, we can see the legacy of female switchboard operators enduring in contemporary digital forms. Today's virtual assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, epitomize the fusion of automated technology with the personable nature historically attributed to female operators. These digital assistants perform a function akin to that of their human predecessors: they connect us to information and facilitate communication, yet they do so with the "smile" once mandated of switchboard operators, suggesting that even as technology advances, some societal expectations remain fixed. In this sense, the dialogue around labor and technology has evolved but the core issues remain: how do we value the human contribution within automated services, and what rights and protections are afforded to the unseen labor still present in these digital systems? As we increasingly incorporate technology into our daily lives, an awareness of these pasts could guide us towards a more equitable technological future.

Footnotes

1. A slight misquote of Shakespeare’s King Lear quoted in “A Design For Living” handbook, 1950, p25. The title of this essay is a modification of a chapter title from the same book.
2. This concept and much research on the topic is indebted to Elinor Carmi, particularly through her book “Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media”, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2020
3. This system of control, including the incorporated element of “feedback” within the system, was a key influence on the creation of cybernetics.
* images by Camila Galaz including redrawn/reworked illustrations from “A Design For Living” handbook, 1950

Bibliography

• Birdsall, Carolyn & Carmi, Elinor. “Feminist avenues for listening in: amplifying silenced histories of media and communication.” Women's History Review, vol. 31, no.4, 2022
• Boden, Theresa, E. “A Design for Living.” Bell Telephone Magazine, Autumn, 1948.
• Boden, Theresa, E. A Design For Living: Program for Self-Development. American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1939, revised edition 1950.
• Boyer, Kate & England, Kim. “Gender, work and technology in the information workplace: from typewriters to ATMs.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 9, no. 3, 2006.
• Carmi, Elinor. “Taming Noisy Women.” Media History, 2015.
• Carmi, Elinor. Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media. Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2020.
• Lipartito, Kenneth. “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920.” The American Historical Review vol. 99, no. 4, 1994.
• New York Telephone Company. An Ideal Occupation for Young Women. Pamphlet, 191-.
• Prescott, Harold. M. “Towards a More Pleasing Service.” Bell Telephone Quarterly, April, 1940.
• Wyatt, Sally. “Feminism, Technology and the Information Society: Learning from the past, imagining the future.” Information, Communication & Society vol.11, no.1, 2008.

The website is 21 megabytes.

1 byte consists of eight binary digits (bits).

The term "digit" derives from having ten digits (Latin digiti, meaning fingers) on our hands, reflecting the ten symbols of the common base 10 numeral system, i.e. the decimal digits.

"Capitalists too, as the novelist Charles Dickens noted, liked to think of their workers as 'hands' only, preferring to forget they had stomachs and brains."

– David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, 2014

“In the factory, we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.” – Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, Chapter 15. Penguin Books, 1976.

During the 17th century, much of Europe witnessed widespread uprisings by workers against the ribbon loom - a mechanised device used for weaving ribbons and decorative trimmings. This invention threatened traditional handweaving crafts, sparking fear among artisans who saw it as a direct challenge to their livelihoods and economic security. The ribbon loom, invented in Germany, was prohibited by authorities across Europe between 1629 and 1719 and even faced public destruction[1]. The widespread opposition to looms that impacted traditional weaving jobs was a political threat as much as a populist one, generating combativeness from workers. Cloth work, historically carried out by women, such as spinning and carding, was the first to be mechanised. In England, James Hargreaves initially kept the spinning jenny secret of producing yarn for his business, but as it followed the 1766 food riots and the falling price angered spinners, they destroyed his machines, forcing him to flee to Nottingham in 1768.

During the early modern period, Britain relied heavily on raw cotton, "the most important raw material of British industry,"[2] primarily sourced from outside the Empire, particularly India, the world's leading producer of cotton textiles under British colonial rule. Reflecting on the devastating impact of this exploitation, Lord William Bentinck, a former Governor-General of India, wrote in 1834: “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.” This colonised globalism, where Britain's textile industry relied on the exploitation of India’s resources and labour, foreshadowed modern outsourcing practices, including the transfer of large-scale data processing for artificial intelligence to India, where lower costs continue to drive such operations.[3]

The Industrial Revolution intensified this Early Modern hardship, as the power loom rendered skilled handweavers obsolete. The resulting unemployment, starvation, and social unrest led to the Luddite movement, where textile workers organised machine-breaking riots against factories and machinery they blamed for their difficulty. The government responded with military force and harsh penalties, enforcing the Frame Acts and suppressing the movement by the 1820s.

Huddersfield, once a hub of Luddite activity, was home to numerous mills that housed the workers central to the movement. Albion Mills, Alma Mill, Aspley Mills, Bradley Mill, Brick Factory/Fountain Mill, and Britannia Mill have all disappeared, leaving no evidence of their history or former presence. The town is home to Alan Brooke, a leading Luddite historian, and the Tolson Museum in Ravensknowle Hall, which showcases Luddite memorabilia. A standout piece is a hair tidy crafted by 23-year-old William Thorpe, a renowned Luddite from Huddersfield. Thorpe created this intricately crocheted piece, adorned with sewn-in hearts, while imprisoned in York Castle in 1813, awaiting trial for the murder of mill owner William Horsfall. On January 8th of that year, Thorpe was hanged and dissected alongside George Mellor and Thomas Smith. Made within the confines of his cell, the hair tidy is a reflection of the repetitive, dehumanising labour that had become second nature. Even awaiting execution, Thorpe’s muscle memory turned to creation, crafting a functional object as an act of quiet defiance. This small gesture of care amidst chaos reflected a life shaped by relentless toil, ending violently in his resistance to industrial oppression. Knitting and embroidery, common pastimes for prisoners, become here a materialisation of time, waiting, and resistance.

The Luddites’ organised militancy and direct action against industrial machinery are an important symbol of resistance as well as an immediate response to workers’ material conditions. Karl Marx captured this in Capital: “Since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material embodiment of capital.” Initially, class consciousness manifested in indiscriminate machine-breaking riots, targeting all machinery within workhouses. However, the Luddites began strategically targeting machines in factories owned by obstinate mill owners (and, in cases like Thorpe's, the mill owners themselves), marking an early instance of class consciousness shaped by industrial machinery.

Machines can oppress, driving ordnance, dependency, labour displacement, environmental harm, biodiversity loss, and even extinction as seen in the case of Turnspit dogs. By exposing this "dead labour," they raise a critical question: does their introduction highlight societal divides by serving as tangible symbols of inequality? The Luddite movement illustrates these dynamics, linking resistance to machinery with broader social tensions and conflicts.

Among the Luddites were ex-soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars, skilled in organising and executing coordinated actions. Operating as a secret society, they planned their raids at night and recruited members through clandestine oaths, despite the fact that oath-taking was punishable by death. Armed with hammers crafted by Enoch and James Taylor – the same company that produced the very machinery they opposed – they carried out nighttime raids, smashing industrial machines in defiance. Disguised in women’s clothing to conceal their identities, they were celebrated as subversive working-class heroes of their time. This form of "camouflage drag" can be seen as a symbolic intersection between traditional roles of men and women. Historically invisible reproductive labour, such as care work, is now a major employment sector in the UK and US, spanning healthcare, education, food service, and insurance.[4] Yet, these roles are increasingly automated or outsourced, reflecting the “feminisation” of the proletariat, with many factory jobs filled by migrant workers.[5] Like housework before it, this hidden world of production remains largely ignored, perpetuating the invisibility of certain labour.

In contrast, the Luddites wanted to be as politically conspicuous as possible. They sent threatening letters, signed under the alias “King Ludd” or “General Ludd,” warning factory owners to dismantle their machinery or face destruction. Along with groups like the Jacobins and the Chartists, they posed one of the greatest internal threats to the English government. Their intimidating uprising prompted the government to devise new methods of suppression and Robert Peel’s establishment of the Metropolitan Police (MET) was partly aimed at quelling such populist revolts.[6]

The Luddites’ actions were a desperate attempt to resist the encroaching horrors of industrial capitalism and to preserve a way of life that was rapidly disappearing. While they opposed labour-replacing technologies that stripped them of their agency, they aimed to protect tools like handlooms which enabled more freedom and skill. Contrary to popular belief, the Luddites were not anti-technology. They were defenders of a balance between labour and tools that upheld the autonomy of the worker. The movement persisted throughout the Industrial Revolution, almost as if it were driven by a sense that life would never be the same again. Or by intuition that these macroinventions[7] would trigger a snowball effect, with machines continuously fueling further technological advancements. One of the machines they were breaking was the Jacquard loom, a device that laid the groundwork for modern binary technology. It’s punch card system, encoding patterns as holes or no holes, later inspired Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and the foundations of computer programming and digital logic.

In small family weaver’s cottages, such as the one at the Skelmanthorpe Textile Heritage Centre near Huddersfield, the loom typically dominated the upper floor, becoming an integral part of the home’s architecture and daily life. These cottages, common among weaving families, were designed to accommodate the handloom as the centrepiece of the household. Its massive presence shaped the structure and function of the home, often leaving children with no choice but to sleep in or around the loom. Daily routines revolved around relentless labour, with weavers working more than 12 hours a day in this confined and demanding environment. The woven cloths were typically sold directly from the doorstep to merchants, reinforcing the home’s dual role as both living space and workplace. The upper floor ceilings were designed to be high enough to accommodate the loom, with long rows of windows strategically placed to maximise natural light. A "taking-in” door, often now sealed, allowed wool to be brought into the loomshop and finished cloth to be removed.[8]

These homes, purpose-built centres of production, supported a mercantilist structure of family labour. Work was seasonal, involved the entire household, and allowed weavers to operate as skilled freelancers, maintaining control over their labour. Industrialisation fractured household production and a certain type of family unity while factory machines and Taylorist systems alienated and enraged workers. This, however, gave rise to a collective resistance and solidarity that the dispersed domestic industry could not achieve. It was only when they were thrown into the “dark Satanic Mills” (William Blake, And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time, 1808), that a new form of solidarity began to emerge.

As Brian Merchant explains in Blood in the Machine (2023), “In the 1800s, automation was not seen as inevitable, or even morally ambiguous. Working people felt it was wrong to use machines to ‘take another man’s bread.’” The Luddites' struggle was against the soulless machinery that reduced workers to mere extensions of capital. The term "Kilogirl" aptly captures this – a tongue-in-cheek measure of computational power that replaced human labour, reflecting technology's role in perpetuating the cycle of production and profit. These transitions highlight a recurring pattern: the tools of progress often displace the very workers who first wielded them. If innovation begs for a human cost, then what does progress mean?

– William Thorpe's hair tidy, crocheted right before his execution on the 8th of January 1813. Courtesy of the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England.

– Photo by Fred Hartley, date unknown. Courtesy of the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England.


Footnotes

1. Mehring, F. (1893). On historical materialism. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1893/histmat/

2. Robbins, L. (1937). Economic planning and international order (p. 247). London: Macmillan.

3. CBS News. (2023). Labelers training AI say they’re overworked, underpaid, and exploited. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/labelers-training-ai-say-theyre-overworked-underpaid-and-exploited-60-minutes-transcript/

4. Fraser, N., & Jaeggi, R. (2024). Capitalism’s crisis of care: An exchange. Past & Present. Advance online publication

5. Birketts LLP. (2023, July 19). Women migrant workers. Retrieved from https://www.birketts.co.uk

6. Lyman, J. L. (1964). The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science, 55(1), 141. Retrieved from https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5222&context=jclc

7. Crafts, N. F. R. (1995). Macroinventions, economic growth, and the 'Industrial Revolution' in Britain and France. The Economic History Review, 48(3), 443–461. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2598183

8. MyLearning. (n.d.). Domestic woollen industry and weaving in the Colne Valley. Retrieved from https://www.mylearning.org/stories/domestic-woollen-industry-and-weaving-in-the-colne-valley/1077

Bibliography

• Blake, W. (1808). "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time"
• Birketts LLP. (2023, July 19). Women migrant workers. Retrieved from https://www.birketts.co.uk
• Crafts, N. F. R. (1995). Macroinventions, economic growth, and the 'Industrial Revolution' in Britain and France. The Economic History Review, 48(3), 443–461. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2598183
• Fraser, N., & Jaeggi, R. (2024). Capitalism’s crisis of care: An exchange. Past & Present. Advance online publication.
• Lyman, J. L. (1964). The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science, 55(1), 141. Retrieved from https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5222&context=jclc
• Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1, Chapter 15, p. 548). Penguin Books.
• Mehring, F. (1893). On historical materialism. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1893/histmat/
• Merchant, B. (2023). Blood in the Machine
• MyLearning. (n.d.). Domestic woollen industry and weaving in the Colne Valley. Retrieved from https://www.mylearning.org/stories/domestic-woollen-industry-and-weaving-in-the-colne-valley/1077
• Robbins, L. (1937). Economic planning and international order (p. 247). London: Macmillan.

A 1969 dedication brochure for Fairchild Semiconductor’s new Shiprock, USA facility shows the likeness of their semiconductors to Navajo woven fabrics. The original captions read:

The Talents of the Navajo people reach beyond imagination. A Navajo woman weaves a perfectly patterned rug without seeing the whole design until the rug is completed.

And:

A Fairchild 9040 integrated circuit is… just one of many different electronic devices made by the men and women who work at Fairchild Semiconductor Shiprock Facility. The 9040 is used in communications satellites like COMSAT.

What until now has passed for ‘civilisation’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

– David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything

In 1990, a small exhibition at MoMA brought together a number of microchip diagrams. Curated by Cara McCarty, Information Art: Diagramming Microchips was made possible by the Intel Corporation Foundation and featured 29 diagrams by the likes of Texas Instruments, IBM, Intel, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, and more. Carver Mead and Robert Noyce, both inventors of the technology, were advisors on the show. Noyce was the first to conclude that integrated circuits could be placed on a single, microscopic chip. He co-founded Intel and Fairchild Semiconductors. He passed away before the exhibition opened; the catalogue is dedicated to him. On display at MoMa, by then, is a foray into the artworld to his legacy as the ‘Mayor of Silicon Valley’.

The catalogue is didactic, going to great lengths to explain the history and importance of microchips in layman’s terms. It also emphasises the craft elements to the production processes. Microchip diagrams are, still today, the templates from which microchips are produced. At the time of the exhibition in 1990, these diagrams were the product of a manual process, its design process not yes completely digitized, its production process not yet completely automated. The catalogue describes the hand-cut process by which many early chip diagrams are made: “After the design was hand drawn on paper, operators had cut the circuit patterns into red cellophane-like sheets of rubylith. The design was then reduced photographically.” Details of chip diagrams are printed to emphasise their decorative nature. The publication goes to significant lengths to detail the visual legibility of the object of the microchip, and details neither the manufacturing process itself nor the workforce, placing all emphasis on the visual aspects of the diagrams and their analogues in MoMa’s collection. The blueprints in the exhibition were added to it.

The catalogue places the exhibition in the longer canon of MoMa’s expansive definition of design. It specifically refers to the 1934 show Machine Art, one of its first design shows. Philip Johnson, founding Chairman of MoMa’s Architecture Department, deemed this show to originate from an interest in the ‘aesthetic merit of certain industrially manufactured objects’. He goes on to specify that these objects are ‘created without artistic intention’. Machine Art’s accompanying publication is a catalogue in both the museological and the commercial sense, displaying vendors and prices for each item exhibited. Yet inarguably, with accession of industrial applications and household appliances alike into the museums collection, this exhibition is indebted to the art historical canon of the readymade.

Obviously referred to in the title, but not in the exhibition texts, is the canonical 1970 MoMa exhibition Information, one of the first international (here meaning: European and Northern American) survey shows of conceptual art which brought together a generation of artists engaged with politics and the media, such a Hannah Darboven, Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci, Hans Haacke, Ed Ruscha, Art & Language, and some one hundred others. Their work is described by the museum as challenging ‘institutional hierarchies’, using ‘ephemeral materials’, and thereby ‘evading typical museum classifications’, ultimately changing the way in which MoMa collects and presents work of art.

We have to read Information Art as an exhibition influenced by the impact of both pioneering shows. If the former influenced the possibility of drawings made for industrial application to be displayed at all, the latter affected the blurring formats of works that could enter into its collections. Cara McCarty is more indeterminate about the distinction between art and design than her predecessors, writing on Information Art that ‘technology does not have a form – we give it one’. This posits technology as the outcome of an almost inevitable development, whereby specific aesthetic decisions can be made by its designers. The catalogue contextualises the exhibition with a page that features nine works of art in the MoMA collection that find an analogue in the microchip diagrams, mostly focussed on the historical phenomenon of the grid: a cave painting in Lacaux; the Chinese symbol for ‘field’; a bird’s-eye view of a Roman city; an engraving by Albrecht Dürer; a Renaissance grid to demonstrate perspective; a Jacquard punch card (itself an artefact of computer history); a table cloth by Anni Albers; an early Ludwig Mies van der Rohe drawing; and the ultimate illustration of the grid in art, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. So far, so square. But the process that is described in the text, that which makes this moment in microchip production so interesting, is one of handcraft; it finds a closer art historical analogue in Matisse’s cut-outs than in Mondrian.

Is there a visual culture to components that elude our senses? Information Art emphasises the ‘mysteriousness’ of integrated circuits, a quality that evades the logic by which the diagrams are produced – whereby data is stored in uniform quadrants, and intricate circuitry can perform random access memory functions. Invoking the quality of mystery allows a museum visitor to appreciate the diagrams on the merit of their beauty, the beauty of Cartesian uniformity and variation. Perfect for a hominid pattern seeking brain. Microchips have ‘no visible moving components, gears, or levers, and they are silent’. In a sense, Information Art captured a moment in industrial design as it was leaving a scale perceptible to the naked eye. Thirty-five years on, it is unimaginable to repeat such an exhibition with contemporary microchip wafers. Automation of the manufacturing process has undercut any ties to craft – the scientists wielding scissors – that supports the presentation of microchips as a product of human ingenuity that is not aided substantially by the computerised processes of calculation. Yet MoMa’s attempt to integrate these circuits to the canonical history of art and design remains a hallmark attempt to explain the specific operations of items otherwise retreating into a black box of specific technological knowledge. The exhibition Information Art engages critically with the beauty of ubiquitously used objects, pinpointing this technological development not as an exceptional accomplishment but one in a longer history of human ingenuity.

Electronic circuits have made the increase of computing power an inescapable drum to contemporary life. New computers and phones come out in 18 month-cycles; and at the cusp of each new cycle, electronics seem to be cosmically faltering, slowing down. For the past 30 years, this rhythm has been set by what happens on an inconspicuous industrial terrain in Velthoven, across the motorway from Eindhoven, the Netherlands. At ASML, they make the machines that make machines—or, more precisely, the machines that make computer chips. Its location might be unassuming, but ASML holds an estimated 80-90%[1] market share in global microchip market, counting giants such as Intel, Apple, TSMC, and others under their clientele. From the motorway alongside their headquarters, the only thing to indicate what it does is that the building itself resembles a computer chip.

ASML was created after Dutch multinational conglomerate Philips bought out a small lithography company named ASMI - Advanced Semiconductor Materials International – in 1984. At the time, Philips was looking to split most Research & Development off from its main company, doing away with the almost mythical importance of the historically well-funded Nat.Lab, retaining only activities related to the development of nuclear power within its main holdings. Initially it housed its new venture – renamed ASML, replacing the aspirational ‘International’ in its name for the descriptive ‘Lithography’ – in a shed next to its headquarters in Eindhoven. In 1985, ASML moved to what is still today its headquarters in nearby Velthoven. Initially, the office buildings were designed to be modular: if the company were to fold, parts of its building could be rented out to others. Instead, the company has grown relentlessly over the past thirty years, and is now the biggest Dutch company in terms of both profit and value.

The relationship between Philips and ASML is a complicated one. Its licenced corporate history, The Money Machine: ASML’s Turbulent Youthby Renée Raaijmakers[2], identifies ASML as having been a struggling company, whose strong management culture of defiance towards its former parent company Philips made it a fertile environment for ‘wild innovation’. The book illustrates this history through the stories of the men involved in the inception of ASML, such as George de Kruiff—who puts his Philips job on the line to buy out the up-and-coming business ASMI—and the reserved Wim Troost—whose passion for computing drove Philips to buy the lithography busines. When I visited ASML last summer, I spoke to an employee who gave me a different perspective. He said he ‘never expected to work for the same company all my career, and certainly not the one my dad worked for, too’. He had been at ASML for over 30 years, and his father had worked at the Philips factory for 40 years before him. If distance from Philips shaped ASML’s early corporate trajectory, the proximity to Philips is certainly felt on the factory floor.

The technology that manufactures microchips is called photolithography. It is a combination of photography—because it uses the principles of dark room printing—and lithography—as it uses techniques of stone etching into silicon wafers. A form of printing invented by German playwright Alois Senefelder in 1798, early lithography used stone from the Solnhofen limestone plateau to cheaply print sheet music and precise maps. Lithography has a longer history in this part of south Netherlands. Some five kilometers from Velthoven, in Valkenswaard, Peter-Louis Vrijdag inherited a lithographic printing plant for packaging materials from his grandfather. The collection of historical lithographic material that he built up over the course of his life serves as the foundation of the local lithography museum, founded in 2011. The latest addition to their collection is a PAS2500/10, a very early model of an ASML (then ASMI) photolithography machine from 1986.

Inside ASML’s newest photolithography machines, thousands of microchips are printed each minute on ‘wafers’: thin, circular slices of crystalline silicon, a semiconducting material. A mask holds the blueprint for a wafer full of microchips in place. These blueprints are developed by clients of ASML, such as Intel or TSMC. The machine generates extreme ultraviolet light, a phenomenon that occurs naturally in outer space, but is replicated down on earth by shooting 50.000 droplets of ultrapure tin into the machine each second. A laser first flattens the droplets, after which a more powerful laser vaporises the tin into a light-emitting plasma. A cone inside the machine focuses this light in the pattern of the blueprint onto a silicon wafer multiple times in quick succession. Light sensitive coating material called ‘photoresist’ is etched away from the silicone surface, revealing the transistors that now form the basic architecture of computer chips. Each microchip contains millions of transistors, and each wafer contains a few thousand of individual chips. The process of focusing the light onto the wafer is repeated to form different layers vertically, of more than 40 layers of transistors stacked on top of each other.[3]

Transistors are the switches that enable the flow of electrons through a microchip. As semiconductor devices, they are made up of three components, one input, and two outputs; a capacitator, a resistor, and an inductor. This architecture is what makes computing digital, and binary. Early transistors were modelled on the hand:the three rods sticking out from a connecting component appeared like fingers, or digits. Its shrinking size was often modelled using the scale of a hand in advertisements, where transistors disappeared from the desk space, to the palm of the hand, onto the fingertip. The binary nature of transistor-based computing refers to transistors’ discrete outputs – neutral, on, or off. This is the basis of translating computer processing into text for human operators, expressed in strings of zeroes and ones.

The massive expansion of computing power from 1959 onwards—when the integrated circuit was first invented, an early name for what would later be known as a computer chip —has been made possible by the colossal compression of transistors on chips. This development has followed a line of growth prophesised by Gordon Moore in 1964, in an article named ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’. Its main thesis stems from the observation that since the invention of the integrated circuit five years previous, the amount of transistors that can be fit onto a single circuit has increased twofold annually. Only dubbed a ‘law’ years later by professor Carver Mead, Moore revised the law in 1974 to a twofold increase every 18 months. The number of transistors per chip has doubled at this rate ever since. As Moore’s law is exponential, each computer chip made now holds a few billion transistors each.

In its over 30 years of production, ASML has considered Moore’s law as a goal, shrinking the precision and speed of its machines to enable its transistor sizes on atomic levels in order to keep up with Moore’s prediction. In 2014, Moore admitted as much himself: ‘rather than becoming something that chronicled progress of the industry, Moore’s law became something that drove the industry…A tremendous amount of engineering and commitment has been required to make that happen.’[4]And in a 2015 interview with the Financial Times, ASML CEO Peter Wennink conceded that ‘our competition is not so much another company, it is Moore’s Law’.[5] If Moore’s law was devised as an unfolding potential, ASML has imbued itsprophecy with an enormous amount of agency, through which it pushes Moore’s law onwards and keeps it artificially alive.

Fulfilling the prophecy of Moore’s law has material repercussions. In his original proposal, Moore noted that the biggest challenge ahead would be heat, generated by the dense cramming of components onto a single chip. Transistors get hot through electrons, which operate at a subatomic level. Electrons carry charge, which is responsible for the creation of information. As electrons flow through a circuit, they generate heat when they encounter other particles. Most of the battery life of devices that feature integrated circuits today, like laptops and smartphones, is spent warming itself up. In order to prevent overheating, the increase of clock rates - the speed at which microchips perform calculations, driven by the speed at which electrons move through the circuit - halted in 2004. Chips have continued to gain processing power, it’s just that they has ceased to match a once corresponding increase in speed.

To continue increasing processing power while maintain clock rates, ASML shrunk transistors made on their machines down beyond a 22 nanometer resolution. To do this, they changed the very method by which they exposed light onto wafers. In 2007, ASML started developing extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) technology, first shipped in 2013. Doing away with reticules and lenses in favour of mirrors and more powerful lasers allowed ASML to lower the ‘benchmarks for transistor density’ to 8 nanometers, and continue to ‘[drive] Moore’s Law forward’[6]. This technology is heavily reliant on ultrapure tin, sprayed into the machine at an ultrafast rate. In many of their promotional materials for EUV, the human scale is replaced by imagery that calls to mind the exponential energy of atomic explosions.

Tighter packaging of transistors on a single planeleads to another issue at this point of keeping up with Moore’s Law: electron bleed. Between the nanometer spaces that electrons travel in the circuit, the number of electrons that ‘jump’ from one place to another in the circuit increases. This heightens chip temperatures exponentially. Instead of packing transistors tighter alongside each other, chip manufacturers who use ASML’s machines to make their products stack the layers of transistors on top of each other, a stack that grows higher and higher with each production cycle. This consequently leads to another problem: the wafer bends upwards or downwards. This is dubbed the ‘sombrero’ or the ‘Marylin Monroe’ effect by ASML scientists, respectively referring to the rim of a Mexican hat or the iconic blowing upwards of a skirt. ASML outsources this issue to their clients to solve, maintaining Moore’s law from their perspective.

Imaginaries of technological progress have been vastly saturated by computer chips since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1959. Since then, transistor sizes keep chipping away. The company that holds almost a 90% market share in this field remains dead set on fulfilling a prophecy that is 60 years old to drive its mission forward. Moore’s law has overrun the imagination of what progress can look like. Currently, it looks like this: more powerful chips, that maintain the same speed, and keep getting hotter. If there were a tarot card that ASML would draw about its future, it could always have been the Wheel of Fortune. At first read, the spinning wafers that feature those tiny slivers of silicone have delivered ASML its business fortune. Upon further investigation, Moore’s Law is the destiny and the fortune of the company, constantly evolving its technologies to end up in the same cycle 18 months per turn.

[1] The Financial Times and Fitch Credit Ratings evaluate it to be 85 and 90 respectively. The discrepancy in these numbers is most likely caused by a confusion of ASML’s activities. Its business can be divided into two activities: systems and applications. Systems refers to the production of photolithography machines, where it is safe to say that more than 95% of the worlds’ chips are made on ASML machines; in terms of applications, they face some competition from Silicon Valley-based companies with large patent portfolios.

[2] published on the occasion of ASML’s 30-year anniversary in 2017 in Dutch as De geldmachine - De turbulente jeugd van ASML.

[3] ASMLCompany, 2014, ‘Our Stories – Gordon Moore About Moore’s Law’, YouTube, [online video], (18 December 2014).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hook, L., 2015, ‘Peter Wennink, ASML: the memory maker: ’, Financial Times, [online]. (13th December 2015)

[6] https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems