Most people would recognise a circuit board if they saw one – the shapes of electronic components and circuits are used commonly enough in graphic design, often as a vague shorthand to symbolise ‘technology’, that even without direct experience we know what the stuff inside our electronic devices looks like. Rich with promise as a symbol of technological achievement, the sight of actual electronic components for most people, however, generally indicates that something has gone wrong. In today’s black-box dominated technological world, an exposed circuit board symbolises failure, malfunction, obsolescence. We are used to having our circuit boards hidden by a veneer of plastic and metal, carefully designed to allow our hands and eyes access to only those elements deemed to be desirable. Should this veneer crack, revealing the fragile components beneath, it is only a matter of time before the device takes its place on the scrap heap alongside its fallen brethren. A trend in the late 1990s, popularised by Apple’s iMac computer, introduced semi-transparent plastic windows into these previously opaque black (or more likely beige) box designs. This, however, did little to demystify the technology inside – instead it simply demonstrated that Apple’s co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs extends his obsessive, uncompromising aesthetic vision to the layout of the circuitry inside the machines. Long before the iMac, the circuit boards of the early Mac prototypes were made by hand using a technique called ‘wire-wrapping’, in which signals are routed between components by wrapping a strand of wire around each of the pins. On first seeing a blueprint of the PC board layout that had been developed, Jobs’ reaction was to critique the aesthetics of the design, declaring one section he particularly approved of to be ‘really pretty’. The layout of the memory chips, however, he decried as being ‘ugly’, proclaiming that ‘the lines [were] too close together’. The engineer who had drawn up the plans protested that the boards worked fine and no one was going to see the inside of the machine anyway, but Jobs was adamant. ‘I’m gonna see them!’ he replied, adding, ‘I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it.’ Unfortunately for Jobs’ delicate sensibilities, the aesthetics and the function of electronic circuits cannot be so easily separated, and his revised, prettified design didn’t perform as well as the original. The physical characteristics of the components and their placement in relation to each other can affect the operation of a circuit significantly. Overlong signal paths can produce unwanted inductive or capacitive effects, heat sensitive components can be disrupted by their hot neighbours, and signal paths that don’t give each other enough room to work with can be the victims of cross-talk – interference similar to crossed lines on a telephone exchange. The final shape a circuit takes, therefore, is dependent on the material properties of its parts, with form being heavily influenced by function. While it takes an engineer to fully understand the guts of a computer, even those uninitiated in the electronic arts can gaze on a circuit board and make a kind of sense of it. Unfolding as if an architectural model of the way we used to think cities would look in the future, the components cluster together in suburbs connected by emerald highways. So strong is this resemblance, in fact, that one artist has constructed an entire scale model of the city of Helsinki from a collection of PC motherboards. This superficial similarity to other, more familiar, objects has been exploited by a number of artists who use mass-produced electronic components in a sculptural manner mainly for their visual qualities, but also to comment on or make reference to cultural and social attitudes towards technology. The choice of Helsinki for the scale model mentioned above, for example, is apt considering Finland’s positive stance on technological development, and gains an extra resonance following the country’s decision to make broadband access a legal right for all its citizens. Liz McLean Knight, a technologist and musician, designs and makes jewellery using electronic components. Her necklaces, earrings and bracelets are constructed entirely from the building blocks of electronic devices – their bright, distinctive colour-coded bodies and wires refashioned into designs that celebrate these essential, ubiquitous objects. The result is a series of 21st century fetish necklaces, with candy-coloured resistors and diodes nestled alongside imposing black and silver capacitors taking the place of coral and stone. In a similar way, Dan Beville has created a stained glass window entitled Conscience and Temptation which uses different coloured PC motherboards in place of glass to create a tableau depicting a traditional ‘good vs evil’ dichotomy, as well as offering a playful take on the Windows™ operating system. Both rely on inducing a kind of ‘double take’ reaction from the viewer and, by merging old and new, create a tension enhanced by seemingly incongruous technological elements removed from the context of the electronic object itself. Today, electronic objects have largely become packages for the incomprehensible technologies they contain – surfaces that communicate the ways in which they ought to be used, their cultural meaning and their corporate identity. Commercial designers of electronic devices have adopted the role of semiotician, defining the technological object in terms of functionality and situating it alongside other packaged and marketed goods as a symbolic wrapper for its ever-shrinking components. With design divorced from engineering, we experience technology in the same way as we do advertising or groceries – it becomes merely a sign, lost in the no-man’s-land between image and object. One consequence of this incomprehensibility and concealment of the inner workings of electronic devices is that our engagement and understanding of machines shifts from the concrete to the abstract. Barry Brummett frames this engagement in terms of ‘depth’ of experience, describing our relationship with electronic technology as ‘cognitive, psychological, experiential – aesthetic’. He also joins Sherry Turkle in her assessment that, just like our experience of other human beings, ‘the physical opacity of [these machines] encourages [them] to be talked about and thought about in psychological terms’. Mechanical systems of gears, pistons and pulleys, however massive or complex, can be comprehended on everyday physical terms. While the abstracted symbols used in schematic diagrams to describe and build electronic circuits sometimes attempt to encode the operation of the components in a visual form, the physical components themselves make no such effort. Simply looking at a sausage-shaped resistor or a multi-legged integrated chip is futile if you want to try and find out how it works, let alone the combination of myriad such components in a typical circuit, because the changes in voltage which constitute the workings of electronic devices don’t actually look like anything. Similarly, if we want to further understand and engage with other people we explore emotions, desires and thoughts, rather than studying x-rays and biopsies. It is always the case that our current notions of technology colour the way in which we conceive of and talk about ourselves, which in turn also recursively affects the way we think about technology. Prior to the ascendency of electronics, the human body was often likened to a machine or a factory, with all the political and socioeconomic trappings these analogies bring. Nowadays it is more likely to be networks and processors that are used as models of the way we work, and advances in biology feed into computer science to build more powerful and efficient machines that take their cues from evolutionary processes and the structure of the brain. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, ‘Our new electric technology is organic and nonmechanical in tendency because it extends, not our eyes, but our central nervous system’. This tendency to take an anthropomorphic view of technology results in a fearful and often squeamish attitude towards the actual circuits and components inside. Breaking the ‘skin’ of an electronic device can have a similar effect on us as seeing inside our own bodies – a mixture of fascination and revulsion. This reaction is exploited by many ‘circuit benders’ who modify electronic devices (including anthropomorphic children’s toys) to perform in ways their manufacturers never intended, and probably would not approve of. These creations are often used to produce swathes of digital noise or fragmented video projections, with tangles of additional wires cascading from their previously uniform shells or their circuitry exposed to the elements. The cumulative effect is jarring and discomforting, as the fragile circuitry is not only foregrounded – both visually and sonically – but deliberately confounded and pushed to the edges of its operation in an often Frankenstein-like display. While circuit bending is a practice that by necessity deals with electronic components, its source material is pre-fabricated, mass-produced circuit boards and their enclosures, often gleefully reworked and restyled. Typically the aesthetics of circuit bent devices take their cues from the psychedelic stylings of the discipline’s founder, Reed Ghazala, with heavy doses of neon spray paint, flashing lights and pseudo-mysticism. Circuit bending draws heavily on Ghazala’s ‘anti-theory’ ideas, relying on the notion that in order to modify an existing circuit you don’t need to know how it works – a little (or no) knowledge can be a powerful thing. A number of artists and makers, however, use their greater knowledge of circuitry and components to investigate other aesthetic possibilities with these rudimentary, industrially produced electronic building blocks. Tristan Perich’s composition 1 Bit Music (2005) playfully explores issues of commodification and technology fetishism that surround electronic music. Like any number of recent albums, it is packaged in a transparent CD jewel case, but in place of the familiar silver disc is a minimal electronic circuit complete with battery, speakers and headphone socket that plays the music when activated. The components, sparse and raw, are arranged to fill the space normally occupied by the CD. Connected by a handful of boldly coloured wires, at first glance the entire mechanism could easily be mistaken for the cover artwork of a standard electronica album, so often are images of technology used to promote and symbolise such music. 1 Bit Music dispenses with these representations and encodings and presents the technology itself both as artwork and as a device for musical production and consumption. The group Loud Objects takes a similar approach to technology, exploring both the visual and sonic aesthetics of electronic components. Standing behind overhead projectors, the performers build primitive sound-making devices from scratch, gradually filling the screens with the abstract geometric silhouettes of their handmade circuits and filling the air with equally abstract synthesised tones. The stark black and white shadows cast by the projectors merge the shapes of the electronics with those of the performers as they lean over to solder more elements onto the emerging circuit. By freeing the components from their usual reliance on a solid circuit board, these artists open up alternative configurations for their circuits, affording possibilities of improvisation and sculptural aesthetics. The undisputed master of such circuit freeforming or ‘space wiring’, however, is Peter Vogel. Running the gamut from impenetrable black boxes (Black Box, 1987) to playful, absurd automata (Panamarenko, 2000), Vogel comments on social and cultural attitudes towards technology by using the technology itself as a medium. His work takes the fundamental raw materials of electronics – integrated chips, resistors, capacitors, diodes and wire – and fashions them into intricate geometric structures where components are chosen and placed as much for their visual as their electronic qualities. The sculptures present an idealised version of the technology they embody – sleek, elegant, seemingly weightless, they display their components proudly as a seamless integration of form and function. Sculpturally, the circuitry works to draw the eye, tracing pointillistic lines around and between the more imposing speakers and motors, with the overall form of the piece subtly influencing the perception of the individual elements. In works such as Series of Sounds (1985) or Schattenorchester I (1989), the small-scale components take on architectural overtones in a similar way to the model of Helsinki mentioned previously. Capacitors appear as cooling towers and integrated chips as buildings, while the whole sculpture hints at an urban utopia – clean, uncluttered and purely functional. Others, such as his Sound Walls invite a more explicitly musical reading. With their wires stretching horizontally between two speakers like a musical stave, the intervening components become as notes on a page of sheet music. Such interactive pieces highlight technology’s ability to blur the boundaries between musical score, instrument and performer, both in the function of the circuit and its structural form – the map becomes the territory. An intertwining of form and function is not new, of course, but as discussed before, unlike their mechanical predecessors electronic devices betray few hints as to the way they work. Electronic technology translates the physical and computational power of machines to a human scale, but in so doing ‘generates abstractions such that nothing which moves or functions assumes discernable form’. These pieces, where the circuit is all there is, provide a meeting point between people and technology where the electronic ‘central nervous system’ made up of interconnected components can be engaged with directly. The title of Vogel’s Duo (2006), for example, refers not only to the two speakers framing the work, but also to the fact that the circuit reacts directly to changes in light levels as people interact with it either actively or passively. By presenting the circuit as it is, unfettered by any enclosure or interface, Vogel goes some way to demystifying the electronic object which, as Anthony Dunne writes, has become ‘a confusion of conceptual models, symbolic logic, algorithms, software, electrons, and matter.’ One of the most important ingredients in this confusion, the transistor – a kind of electronic switch that forms the basis of logic boards and computer processors – was developed in 1947 at Bell labs in New Jersey and would just about fit in the palm of the hand. It was a cryptic object constructed from a spring, a triangle of plastic and a germanium crystal and, with its resemblance to a stylised bolt of lightning, possessed a sculptural quality borne out of the electrical properties of its parts. Today, the computer on which I am writing this essay contains nearly three hundred million transistors in a space a fraction of the size. This Warholian multiplication coupled with extreme rationalisation and miniaturisation has robbed the transistor of its original form and scale, erasing any possibility of apprehension and appreciation. Artists have attempted to bridge this ‘gap between the scales of electrons and objects’ in a number of ways. Daniel Weil’s Clock (1983) is a reaction against miniaturisation, combining the largest circuit boards available at the time with wine glasses and dinner forks to create an electronic clock. The forks snake along the floor, end to end, providing a conduit for the power to flow to the oversized circuit board, which in turn has its few necessary components arranged in an array of crude, spark-like flashes. Similarly, Hermann Scharfetter’s Hydradio is a fully functioning vacuum tube radio constructed with aesthetically considered, macroscopic components. Spreading out across a tabletop a device typically contained in a pocket-sized plastic casing, Scharfetter has combined woven copper resonator coils, alchemical bell-jars and water tanks in order to listen in to the messages transmitted through the ether. This recontextualisation of familiar objects based on their natural, electrical properties serves not only as a reminder of the history of these everyday devices, but also of the fundamental, physical forces underlying their operation – and that of every other piece of electronic technology. Paradoxically, it demystifies modern-day electronic devices, only to reveal deeper unknowns. Just as the discovery that a rainbow is produced by light refracting through tiny water droplets does nothing to diminish its beauty, finding out that a capacitor – one of the most ubiquitous and essential components in any electronic circuit – can be made from just a few drops of salt water, only heightens the sense of wonderment. There is nothing magical, mysterious or special about the blobs of plastic, ceramic and silicon that make up our electronic devices – they are made from the same stuff as everything else and obey the same laws. Or, looked at another way, everything is magical, mysterious and special. 2010