Pocket Fiche

This is a project about curiosity and discovery. It also raises questions about microchip fabrication and access, economies of scale, data compression, and longevity with respect to physical storage.

Pocket Fiche is a self-contained unit of compressed, physical storage.

Viewable through a pocketable microscope, it comes with a built-in golden slide fabricated using the same technology used to make microchips.

To view the slide, place the microscope up close to your eye. Use the sky or another lightsource as a backlight.

Pan the adjustable lens portion across the slide portion in order to explore the slide. The field of view is 0.5mm, which displays approximatley 196,000 pixels at time.

Think of Pocket Fiche as the Earth bound version of the Voyager golden record.

This is the first time ever that nano-fabrication is accessible at a limited and bespoke scale. Over 200 participants, including artist friends contributed to the collection of imagery that will make up the contents of the golden slide.

This project is a collaboration with Miles Segal (Gotham Silicon), whose mission is to make microchip fabrication more broadly accessible. Creating ultra high resolution micron-scale imagery is the very first step in this process.

Those are clips of Miles in the Columbia University Nano-fabrication Facility where he is developing a workflow to make the technology required to build microchips more accessible.

Pocket Fiche in hand.

Assembling Pocket Fiche.

Adjusting the focus.

With a single tiny lens, you can pan around and discover a surprising amount of information, compressed to the size of a quarter.

Diagram to demonstrate how much of the fiche you see at any given time when examining it through the microscope.

Diagram showing Pocket Fiche field of view as it relates to number of pixels visible at one time. The 1um resolution the viewable area at any given time will contain approximately 196,000 pixels. The total printed region is approximately 19mm diameter and contains approximately 283,000,000 pixels.

Pocket Fiche Slide Assembly on the left and the Lens and Focus Assembly on the right.

Pocket Fiche in panned position viewed from the lens side.

Pocket Fiche in panned position viewed from the fiche side.

Pocket Fiche prototype scanning map of NYC buildings.

A self-contained unit of long-term physical storage.

Fabricated using the same methods used to build computer chips and designed with durability and longevity in mind, the Pocket Fiche slide is an etched layer of gold, sandwiched between sapphire plates. Pure gold is a highly stable element, so the contents on the Pocket Fiche slide should be preserved indefinitely. The gold is protected by sapphire, which helps prevent scratching.

Pocket Fiche is designed to function independent of external infrastructure. Take it into the woods, or the desert. The contents are visible as long as you have a light source. A lightbulb or a bright sky works just fine.