Quoting Robin Sloan:
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.
Sloan’s post is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately — it was occasioned by his reading of Jennifer Roberts’ Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, which I hope to read as soon as I can get my hands on it.