Workshop Silicon Landscapes
Imaginations, Materialities, and (Geo-)Politics of a Raw Material
Date: 22.05.2025—23.05.2025, 05:15—07:00
Location: May 22, 5:15 pm (CEST) via Zoom and May 23, 9 am - 6 pm at Institute for European Ethnology, Berlin.
Silicon is a key raw material for the materialities and imaginations of the digital world. Today, the word silicon is inextricably linked to Silicon Valley and the central role of tech companies in digital capitalism. In this constellation, silicon stands for a new variant of the “California ideology” and is representative of tech solutionism and the industry's creative and immaterial work cultures. The success of this narrative has inspired cities and governments around the world to declare their own silicon regions in order to participate in this narrative and economy. The idea of a “Silicon Savannah” (Nairobi, Kenya) or the narrative of Romania as the “Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe” are linked to hopes for economic growth through the concentration of start-ups and the promotion of digital creative work.
The original meaning of silicon as a key resource for the manufacture of modern semiconductor chips is being forgotten. This also applies to Silicon Valley, which is hardly associated with semiconductor production anymore. Yet it was the development and production of ever smaller and more powerful silicon-based microchips that gave this region its name and its initial momentum. However, only traces of the production of these chips remain here, for example in the form of irreversible soil contamination at former production sites. Semiconductor manufacturing has now almost completely shifted to East Asia, particularly Taiwan.
Powerful semiconductors are a key component in numerous products, from smartphones and satellites to cars and refrigerators to all applications of artificial intelligence. Against this backdrop, their production geographies and supply chains are once again coming into focus and are being negotiated as decisive factors in economic, political, and military dominance. In the context of a much-vaunted “chip war,” China's claims to Taiwan, with its superior production capacities, are seen as an existential economic and military threat to the global North. In response to this situation, governments are striving for nearshoring and awarding subsidies worth billions to relocate the production of semiconductor technology to their own territory and sphere of influence. The resulting “silicon landscapes” are more reminiscent of the origins than the present of Silicon Valley. For even if the myth of creative work is occasionally invoked here, the new semiconductor clusters, such as “Silicon Saxony” (Germany) or the “Silicon Alps” (Austria), are all about material and highly complex production processes based on the raw material silicon.
The workshop aims to explore the materialities, imaginations, and (geo)politics associated with silicon, bringing together research on various “silicon landscapes,” from California's valleys to Saxony's lowlands to the Austrian Alps.