Everything is printing

I’ve just fin­ished a reread of Contact: Art and the Pull of Print by Jen­nifer L. Roberts, a book so tremen­dous it ought to be required reading for anyone inter­ested in

• printing (duh)
• graphic design
• visual culture (particularly of the 20th century)
• computation!!

This blog post is really just a stub, a place­holder for a bigger thought, and that thought goes: com­pu­ta­tion is printing.

It is not by coin­ci­dence that the key­stone tech­nology in microchip fab­ri­ca­tion is rooted in the region with the world’s deepest, densest tra­di­tion of lens­making and printing: tech­nolo­gies that, in the 20th century, braided together to define a whole gen­er­a­tion of techniques. Lithography, phototypesetting, photogravure, Letraset … the doc­u­men­tary Graphic Means is great on this. It’s likely that your mental time­line of print tech­nology leaps from move­able type, pos­sibly in its Lino­type incarnation, straight to desktop publishing — mine did! But there’s such rich ter­rain in between.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Rubylith was used to mask out typefaces, and it was used to mask out chips. Come on!!

Even today, you learn about the latest and weirdest chip fab­ri­ca­tion techniques and like: it’s still lith­o­g­raphy: making marks on stone. Exotic lith­o­g­raphy, sure; lith­o­g­raphy at the limits of physics, yep; lith­o­g­raphy that tres­passes into the third dimension, absolutely — but all printing does that! Contact makes this case convincingly.

Anyway: everybody’s always talking about chips, and I guess I just want to insist, they are more than any­thing else PRINTED, and the print in all its incar­na­tions is this deeply, end­lessly fas­ci­nating human artifact. One of the top ten. Top three.