Pocket Fiche

Description

This is a project about curiosity and discovery. It also raises questions about microchip fabrication and access, economies of scale, data compression, and longevity with respect to physical storage. Pocket Fiche is a self-contained unit of compressed, physical storage. Viewable through a pocketable microscope, it comes with a built-in golden slide fabricated using the same technology used to make microchips. To view the slide, place the microscope up close to your eye. Use the sky or another lightsource as a backlight. Pan the adjustable lens portion across the slide portion in order to explore the slide. The field of view is 0.5mm, which displays approximatley 196,000 pixels at time. Think of Pocket Fiche as the Earth bound version of the Voyager golden record. This is the first time ever that nano-fabrication is accessible at a limited and bespoke scale. Over 200 participants, including artist friends contributed to the collection of imagery that will make up the contents of the golden slide. This project is a collaboration with Miles Segal (Gotham Silicon) , whose mission is to make microchip fabrication more broadly accessible. Creating ultra high resolution micron-scale image