Towers is another of my primitive works. It is intended to evoke feelings of ancient times and ancient places. In this work, you see towers rising upward and getting caught in a scramble of lines and colors. This is my version of the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is a bible story in which man tries to build a giant tower as a monument to himself, but man’s arrogance so offends God, than he places on man a plague of many languages. In the ensuring communication fiasco, work on the Tower, and city of Babel, comes to screeching halt. I think I have been to Babel.

For most of my years working with computer systems, getting computers to communicate with each other has been a pox that seems to have no cure. In my early days, there was no communication at all, or you used slow modems. These modems transmitted data at the blazing speed of 300 bits per second. Today, even for casual home communications, cable modems transmit at over 2,000,000 bits per second. Recent technologies like the Internet and Services Oriented Architecture are showing promise for seamless integration of computer systems … but I’m not holding my breath :) Until that time, computers will continue to be Towers of babble.

The yellow towers in this artwork are aluminum traces interconnecting transistors on a computer chip. The different colors are generated by the different kinds of silicon used to build silicon chips. These layers are separated by silicon oxide, which is transparent. We can see down into early chips, which might be only three or four layers deep. Light passing through these layers gets reflected and refracted. Depending on the thickness of the layers, the wavelengths of light, and the angle of the light, you can see some very awesome colors.