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This lecture at the 38C3 conference follows an ex-ballerina's journey through fluid computers, handmade semiconductors, and cosmetic synthesizers. Explore the seductive aspects and hidden narratives connecting circuitry to natural systems, salty fluids, and minerals while understanding the significance of alternative hardware morphologies. Delve into an intimate visual essay on an alternative history of computer hardware where minerals, cosmetics, and fluids combine in tactile experiments. Discover how a lipstick converted into a sound generator reveals toxic entanglements with lead, one of its main historical ingredients, and how lead ore appears both in cosmetics and early 20th-century technologies like crystal radio demodulation. Follow the parallels between different hardware materialities and personal stories about computing components, starting with the beauty industry and moving through toxic concoctions containing heavy metals that evolved into predecessors of the first transistors and their alternative fluidic counterparts using air and water instead of electricity. Learn about fluidics, a forgotten technology that requires only simple fluid matter guided by natural phenomena to build computing circuits, and examine how fluidic circuits' seductive forms might reimagine the morphologies of our current electronic machines. Presented by Ioana Vreme Moser, this 38-minute talk combines art, beauty, and technology in unexpected ways.
