Integrated Circuits: From Silicon Valley to Bangalore

Since 2000, Silicon Valley-based photographer Angela Buenning Filo has been exploring the way technology is transforming the landscape there. Silicon Valley is an international symbol of technological advancement and financial opportunityóa place defined by products and profits. But it is also a place where people live. In this series of photographs, Filo charts the push and pull of the Valleyís progress and physical destruction, and explores the ongoing transformation of the place she has called home for more than a dozen years.

Her images survey Silicon Valleyís neat rows of houses, glass-enclosed office buildings, slightly out-of-date strip malls and grid-locked highways, showing us visual clues of the economic changes shaping our values, motivations and relationships and influencing what we build, buy and discard.

The landscape of Silicon Valley is in constant flux. Filo has many times returned a few days later to a place that intrigued her, only to find that the house or office building has disappeared. In its place is a deep excavation, ready for the next foundation to be poured. Remarkably, in the midst of rapid change, remnants of Silicon Valleyís agricultural past can still be found. Tiny patches of once-sprawling orchards continue to bear fruit, even as plans for the transformation of that land into office parks and retail centers are finalized.

Filoís images capture a specific moment in the history of this region. Made over the Silicon Valleyís recent history of boom and bust, these photographs are, in part, an attempt to chronicle a fleeting instant, a disappearing geography. But they are not made out of a longing for what used to be, or a desire to hold on to the past. Instead, this work was created with an eye to the future, to a landscape that might be. It is meant neither to glorify Silicon Valleyís innovations, nor to condemn its excesses, but simply to question and call attention to the choices we have made along the way. Some believe Silicon Valley is a model to be replicated. Others think that it is a warning we must heed. Above all, it shows us the future, and in doing so gives each of us a chance to decide where we stand.

Outsourcing impacts both the culture migrating its manufacturing and the developing culture on the receiving end. In recent years Silicon Valleyís vast technological expertise and economy has migrated to India: the Valleyís bust has led to Indiaís boom. In an attempt to better understand Silicon Valleyís profound role and ripple effects in the global economy, in 2006 Filo visited Bangalore, India, a place geographically distant from, and yet now inextricably intertwined with her home.

One of the leading regions in the world for the outsourcing of U.S. tech jobs, Bangalore has rapidly been transformed from a sleepy retirement haven to a leading global center for technology. Workers, jobs, commerce, venture funding and ideas are traveling with exponentially increasing rates along the umbilical cord that now connects Silicon Valley and Bangalore. This new link, brought on by the confluence of complex global economic factors, has created wealth for many Indians while the painful poverty of countless others remains unchanged. Indiaís environment, however, has been severely impacted. As with Filoís Silicon Valley project, her ongoing India series explores the way technology is irrevocably transforming the landscape of Bangalore and the lives of those who call it home.  

Angela Filo

Work from Filoís Silicon Valley series has been exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco Camerawork and the Center for Photographic Art, among other venues. Her photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fidelity Investments, and the Peninsula Community Foundation and were recently published in the book Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl.

Raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Filo holds a BA in human biology from Stanford University and a MA in journalism from UC Berkeley. She teaches journalism at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, California.  

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