The Microchip and the Handstein

The Handstein.

One July night in 1764, 1,200 local mineworkers convened in a Slovakian town to take part in a smoky torchlit parade—just a portion of the fanfare that greeted Joseph II and his retinue on a visit to the mining regions of Lower Hungary. On that visit, Joseph and his brother Leopold II toured the area’s mints and mines, along the way receiving a wide array of commemorative gifts: samples of silver and gold; mallets for extracting ore from underground deposits; a damask rose-gold overcoat that exemplified local mineworking attire.^[1] [2]

Joseph and Leopold each also received what was called a Handstein.

A genre of decorative object which, at present, has fallen so far into obscurity that the term now seems mostly to draw puzzled looks, the Handstein would not have been out of place in the royal collections of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Central Europe. Sized modestly enough to be examined while held in one hand (hence “hand stone” in German), the curio was typically made from a piece of ore sourced from an underground mine—chosen specifically for its remarkable form. The artisan tasked with setting that ore into an ornate pedestal would often also complete the piece by adorning it with miniature figurines and architectural components—huts, shrines, archways, even roads and rails. Sometimes these embellishments illustrated historical or Biblical scenes (one iconic Handstein in the Kunstkammer Wien tells the story of David and Bathsheba). But more often than not, these tableaux were made over to represent the miniaturized landscapes of mining operations themselves. Pewter mineworkers wielding pickaxes can be found nestled in some Handsteine; others are bedecked with industrial scaffolding and miniature rail systems, with mine-carts, that wind and twist around the ore formation’s crystal crannies, transformed into looming, craggy hillsides. Transformed as such, Handsteine in essence became aestheticized small-scale models of resource extraction, made from the extracted resource itself.

While it is hard to find a present-day analog to the European fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Handsteine, the closest contemporary descendant of the form seems to be found via a quick search on various online collectible sites, using the search phrase “geode diorama.” Like the hemispherical rinds of a scooped-out grapefruit, these objects come in split-open halves, their insides betraying figurines that resemble mineworkers aiming their pickaxes at crystalline walls. These objects sell around $40-60 per piece. Unlike a geode diorama that might sit atop a nightstand—maybe treated as kitsch, maybe purchased on a whim— the Handstein’s erstwhile function, in royal Kunstkammern, reached toward grander ends; they “symbolized the natural wealth of a country” even while also being “prototypical demonstrations of the bond between nature and art.”^[3]

In that latter function, one might also notice certain affinities between the scholar’s rock (供石 in Chinese, 수석 in Korean) and the Handstein: both sinuous stone formations whose forms are meant to prompt admiration for both the accessorized object itself and the larger terrain from which it came. But unlike a scholar’s stone, a Handstein assumes a mantle of adornment, literalizing itself as a small world, a scale model of an industrial landscape.

Could the relative obscurity of the Handstein be attributable, in part, to a certain monstrousness it radiates, at least to those occupying a certain contemporary vantage point? My own critical eye, raised on affordable prefab furniture and immersed day-to-day in white-cube exhibition spaces, certainly recoils at images of these rocks. What drives such a reaction? A few guesses: For one, the Handstein, as with any number of other gnarled, twisting, inhuman forms, offers the (by-now-familiar) terror of the natural sublime. For another, as a scale model of a geographic site that begets its own material sourcing, the Handstein also hints at the possibility of infinite regress, the horror infiniti of the Greeks: imagine dollhouses in the world of dollhouses and Handsteins in the worlds of Handsteins, and turtles all the way down.

But on top of all that—and perhaps most offensively to a sort of global citizen for whom taste encapsulates a certain progressive-mindedness — a horror might be inspired by the Handstein’s symbolic function: its unabashed glorification not only of a region’s mineralogical fecundity, but also the extractive infrastructures built to take advantage of it. These days, if interest in measuring an empire’s financial clout via the gilded objects in its rulers’ collections has waned—replaced, perhaps, by the interest in measuring a nation’s financial status via the sheer amount of technology that can be crammed into the trouser pockets of several million citizens—the products that emerge from the meeting of raw resources and skilled labor are not made small so that they are spectacularly precious, like the Handstein, but made made small, rather, so that they are hidden: hidden in the electronics of light-up sneakers and LED ceiling fans, hidden in the abstraction of numbers like GDP and GNP. 

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The Microchip.

When Edmund Burke famously outlined properties of the sublime, he addressed the notion of scale, averring that grandness and height were crucial.^[1]But he did not neglect miniature worlds:

In tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.

Burke’s words seem to lay out an early track for contemporary responses to the aesthetics of the integrated circuit, or microchip, the materiality of which (like the Handstein before it) seems to instantiate the value of access to resource-refinement infrastructures in geopolitical influence. When MoMA mounted its 1990 show Information Art: Diagramming the Microchip the show’s curator, Cara McCarty, wrote of the microchips as “objects of wonderment,” speaking of their “concealed beauty.”

Although not designed for aesthetic appeal, the diagrams are beautiful and powerful images in their own right and are influencing textile artists, graphic designers, and painters. The texture of the lines, intrinsic spatial features, delicacy, repetitive detail, and colors create sumptuous patterns that have the same power to inspire and intrigue us as some of the best paintings of our time. They are patterns for delectation; we can take pleasure in them even if we do not understand the technology.^[2]

 
Architect Toyo Ito found inspiration in that show and wrote that an “enlarged photograph of a microchip is like a computer processed bird's-eye view of a city.”^[3] The aestheticization of the integrated circuit was to be expected; in our search for metonyms and analogies for contemporary existence, the microchip is an obvious candidate, offering speed as productivity (Moore’s Law), diminution as democratization (“a cell phone in every pocket”), but also the networked orientations of digital life that acquire so much complexity that they hover just outside individual comprehension: forming a “secret aesthetic of their own”^[4]as Thierry Chaput wrote.

Arthur Drexler, erstwhile MoMA director, said that microchips foretold “one change that technology is likely to make on many of our common artifacts: the dematerialization of solid forms into clusters of linear relationships.”^[5]

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By now, it might be overdetermined, if not even trite, to understand what we will call microchip aesthetics as a consequence of contemporary life. But what if they could be drawn into conversation with the Handstein, not as a precursor, and certainly not to re-entrench a historiographic arc that extends from the Enlightenment to the digital age, but rather as a way to think “from the entanglement of past and present,” to borrow Jussi Parikka’s words?^[1]

It’s telling that the kunstkammer—the cabinet of curiosities in which Handsteine frequently occupied a visible role—remains a familiar (even over-used) analogy in current contemporary-art discourse, perhaps resonant for its evocations of both the embrace of cluttered abundance that marks contemporary consumerism, as well as the sort of research-based, science-inflected, interdisciplinary orientation that characterizes so many current artistic practices. The Handstein, by contrast, seems to hold no parallel traction as a descriptor that resonates in contemporary discourse: maybe because, at first glance, whatever operations it might perform would seem, if not dated, at least unique to its time.

But what if there was a poetics to be salvaged from the Handstein? What could we make of work that focuses in on local knowledge, but also simultaneously uncovers—un-hides—its own material dependence on global resource infrastructures? Microchip aesthetics, to return to our tongue-in-cheek term, foreground sleek flatness, infinitesimal scale, inconceivable complexity in minimalist containers to hint at a secret realm where enchantment endures. Extending everywhere in exhibitionary practice, they manifest in any number of ways: whether in the encasing of working electronic parts within smooth plastic shells, or in the long lists of materials found on tombstone labels—lists which are actually stories about global sourcing and resource procurement well-worth listening to, but which read as mere doses of trivia, forgettable, corresponding to nothing being done by the object to which they refer.

But what if “small-world” artworks that prioritize the sleek, the compact, and the hidden were to hold those priorities in tension with something else: something that recognizes—even trumpets—its own inevitable role as a monument to the blunt or even ugly material realities of its own sourcing? Surely artists’ answers to the increasingly tangled skein of global resource extraction and trade (not to mention its often catastrophic effects) cannot merely be to hide those tangles away within the convenience of small, simple marvels. So how would we move towards a more complicated tension? Could artworks index their own material sourcing, even when made at a scale small enough to be held within the palm of one’s hand? What if an artist’s materials were expressed as monstrous stories about procurement and provenance? What if those in-depth stories were brought into close contact with an artwork’s form—and what if that form itself acknowledged origins in cuts made into the Earth? What new room would be made to marvel? What room would be made to recoil?