SILICON AND I

by Carla Viparelli

I met silicon at the table of Bebop, an old wine bar in Naples where I often get good ideas. I was there to work on the project of a site specific installation for the “Mangiafoglia” restaurant. And the inspiration did not fail to come: “Basilicon Valley!” and everything began.
I have realized drawings and panels and video animations in which a basil plant turned into a microchip germ and a peapod into a sequence of printed circuits. I discovered that the symbol of Silicon Valley is a leaf. The coincidences were too many not to study the matter more in depth. For two months I researched silicon, and the more I learnt the more I was amazed by the secrets this element on the one side conceals, and on the other reveals.
Two apparently opposed realities have their roots in silicon: nature and technology, which it contains in the bud, so to say, like Descartes’ pinecone (in which res cogitans and res extensa, that is to say thought and matter, coexist) or the alchemists’ philosopher’s stone, capable of turning into and transforming any other substance on Earth.
Silicon is found everywhere in nature: in earth (sand, flint), in fresh and salt water (diatoms, plankton, krill) in our body (bones), in plants (equisetum, sugar cane), in the aeroliths coming from space. In spite of this our existence is identified with carbon, while silicon is associated with the cyber universe, humanoids and robots. Why? Because with the adequate treatment (when it is boosted with other elements) it becomes a semiconductor; it becomes capable of transmitting information: light, sound and data. Its chemical structure is transformed in a web of global communication. Its physical nature may be altered to create glass structures or to produce abrasives, but it may also be dematerialized, becoming the basis of the virtual world.
I have become fascinated by the dynamics of semiconductors; they are not just marvels of science, they also embody an ethical principle, namely that without a modulated frequency nothing is obtained. Unless a good conductor is tempered, its original power can be neither managed nor utilized. It is necessary to come to terms with an intruder, be it boron or germanium, in order to optimize the initial quality.
What a powerful metaphor of life! We are usually overwhelmed by ourselves; together with others, with another, we become human because we become a part of a whole; we can communicate, transmit, and develop our potential. Silicon, on the other hand, renounces an electron of its valence band which is literally ousted by an electron of another substance, but this homeless, driven out of its abode by necessity, occupies another in its turn, and so on. And this movement of compulsive expulsion opens a true riverbed, a river of communication, a sea of life.