Matter Transmission by Nicolás Salazar Sutil

Author:Nicolás Salazar Sutil [Sutil, Nicolás Salazar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, General, Science, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Nature, Ecology
ISBN: 9781501339486
Google: 37JTDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2018-05-17T03:33:46+00:00

6

Prehistories of Media II: The Screen

Despite the passing reference

Edward Shanken writes in his book Art and Electronic Media that “ever since the Paleolithic cave paintings of deer hunts at Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE), artists have used static media to suggest and represent the vitality of entities in motion.”1 There are, quite the contrary, no scenes of deer hunts inside Lascaux. Perhaps Shanken is referring to the famous image of Bird Man and Bison, in a section of the cave known as The Shaft, where you will find an ambiguous beaked figure standing before a bison that appears to be speared, although it is not clear whether the line that cuts through the bull is a spear for sure, or a symbol that stands for something else. There are no paintings of realistic hunting scenes in Lascaux or in any other cave in Europe that we know of. So why make this reference? What does the passing (and often inaccurate) reference to cave “art” add to a broad compendium of electronic media art? In addition to the clichéd idea that cave painting is “art,” and that cave paintings depict scenes of hunting, or that they represent life, Shanken’s comment is fairly typical, as it exemplifies a tendency among media scholarship to throw in passing references to prehistoric caves in genealogical studies of contemporary art and media.

Despite the many passing references, there have not been lengthy works devoted to the re-appraisal of prehistoric caves from an electronic media point of view, which is one of the reasons I embarked on this project in the first place. This is surprising, given the major culture industry reanimation of heritage caves, and the number of interpretation centers that have opened in the last decade that use cutting-edge technology and new media to reappraise European prehistoric “art.” The “from/to” or “ever since” sentence construction turns the entire forty thousand years of cave intervention into a lineal sequence, a narrative leading up to cinema, animation, photography, modern art. However, this logic is highly problematic, not least because, as I intimated earlier, the cave remains always present at the level of an embodied encounter.

Like the label “art,” the label “media” in the narrow sense can be easily misunderstood. If “media” is a word that refers to how communication or transmission is established by an agent that serves as go-between, then at least two meanings of the word are being pulled apart here: one concerns the technologization and industrialization of mediation, the other concerns a vitalization of mediation through landscape-based transmission. “Media,” I must insist, is up for grabs. To think that a history of industrialized media communication can be imposed on a prehistory of media as matter is the point that is being contested here.

In an attempt to dig out old media artifacts, the field of media archaeology has also referenced the cave in passing. Pouncing on the hackneyed idea that prehistoric caves are a form of proto-cinema, Erkki Huhtamo points out the obvious: “Ancient cave paintings depicting

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