I Thought ASML Slept on Sundays is a sonic infiltration of ASML, the Dutch tech giant that holds a monopoly on the machines that create the chips powering global computation, surveillance, warfare, and daily life. The company’s processes are locked down: invisible, inaudible and engineered to resist intrusion. So we listened on the edges.

Through on-site investigation, we captured the periphery: birds nesting, machines humming, planes landing nearby and a worker whistling within the robotic systems. This archive became a map of what leaks; a study of the politics of white noise radiating from ASML’s manufacturing buildings. A sonic fog designed to blur, mask, or misdirect. Remotely, we turned our attention to silence: encrypted ASML patents involving filter technology and high precision components, gated access and missing documentation. We decoded and reimagined these diagrams as sound, constructing speculative sonic blueprints of machines. The installation has three layers. The outer core presents fragmented white noise, birdsongs, found materials and poetic residue. The inner core contains extracted interviews and accessible data. At its centre are sonic speculations built through reverse-engineering of sealed technologies.

The project emerges from a confrontation with technological acceleration; the race to transcend Moore’s Law and shrink the world to a whisper. ASML’s clean rooms are sealed. Vibrations are filtered for minimal disturbance. Light is so precise that extreme ultraviolet cannot pass through air. Everything operates at the scale of atoms and quarks. ASML machines are safeguarded from human contamination, distanced from our comprehension, and insulated from entropy.

In this world, silence is control.
ASML never sleeps, even if sometimes unheard.
Will ASML reach its divine acceleration goal: absolute silence?

With Emma Zerial and Mathis Marsepoil.

Special thanks to Bahar Noorizadeh for the guidance and support during the research and development processes of the project, and to Doug O’Laughlin (Fabricated Knowledge), for an extensive conversation full of insights.