Silicon Island

How did Taiwan become the chipmaker for the world? Initially hobbled by the island’s limited resources and situated in a complex geopolitical environment between competing world powers, Taiwan has nevertheless carved out a unique path as a tech giant: not just a maker but also an innovator in the high-tech sector. Reviewing Honghong Tinn’s Island Tinkerers for Books & the Arts, Yangyang Cheng traces the birth of the computing industry in Taiwan and its growth into one of the leading chip manufacturing centers as “a project that involved many non-state actors… university students, corporate engineers, assembly workers, and homegrown entrepreurs.” “Their accomplishments in reshaping the Taiwanese economy and the electronics industry,” Cheng writes, gives us a “new way to conceive state power, where strength is not tied to land mass but lies in the ability to open up to water, to find new passageways and forge unexpected crossings.” But just as in the United States and in China, one question remains paramount: “Few are pausing to ponder what the computing power is for,” and whose interests it will serve. Read “How Taiwan Became the Chipmaker for the World”

A Living Archive

Peter Hujar often photographed himself, but the rarest shots of Hujar are those taken by others, candid glimpses that divulge his inner world. One of these is a Polaroid from the 1970s of Hujar, nestled on a couch with his longtime friend, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, their heads tilted and conspiratorial in the piercing flash. This image of friendship helps anchor Ira Sachs’s new film, Peter Hujar’s Day, adapted from the transcript of a long-lost conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz in which the photographer recounted to the writer all the events of the day before. In her review of the film, Phoebe Chen finds that what Sachs has achieved in this peculiar adaptation is finding a way to “foreground what cannot be seen on the written page: the attentive look” of two intimate interlocutors, and that through the channeling of the aesthetic of Hujar’s photographs, the film comes to resemble something like “a live performance of [his] archive.” Ultimately, “what emerges is not an elegy, despite the incoming decade of [the AIDS crisis] and unbearable loss, but a glimpse of the love between two old friends and the recognition that keeps their world alive.” Read “A Living Archive of Peter Hujar”