1000 Words
The production of images throughout history.
Not a secret, texts longer than 280 characters are still read by a few people, and blogs and books are catering to them. A man paid 44 billion for an ap that encourages people to tell their story or read a story in those 280 characters. ( Republic of Moldova’s GDP is 8 billion) But people go beyond that number by posting images. As the word goes an image is a thousand words. This need to tell stories, real of filtered, the need of being seen and seeing others, is the subject of this brief blog entry.
The cave paintings were probably made by a few members of a group. Some think they were female, as they spent more time in the caves, giving their males a “shopping list” before words existed.
Hand prints in some caves show more people took part in that selfie event, from children to men.
The Borneo paintings are the oldest found, and they already had a narrative.
Division of work came in, specialization became a thing. People with a talent for painting/sculpture worked for the people who were able to pay them. The story of “official history” started.
We still have examples of people who illustrated events (mostly) in a simple form. Those stories were points of views of the commoner. Graffiti is a form of that personal voice and some date back from the old Egyptian Dynasties.
Then religions came in, image creators were commissioned to tell official stories to the people that could not read. In some cases such “comic books”/depictions were/still are completely forbidden. That to me is a clear recognition of the power of image story telling.
Jumping over millennia, the photo camera, god blessed her soul till the advent of Photoshop, started telling the stories of everyone who had one. People who did not have one, were often happy when someone took their photograph, as they were. Some understood the nature of “writing history through images” and started posing, showing the better side of their face.
Go to a flea market, there will be boxes of nameless people telling the future they were there, in early 1800s. I have a photograph of my great grandparents, very poor Greeks from Kefalonia. In 1845 they did something to ensure future members of their family will know a bit of their story. They really speak to me, they tell me something.
Boom! comes the phone camera and the internet, where everyone can not only take a selfie with a filter but also send it out in the world, hoping to be seen and appreciated.
Humans sent a Voyager drawing of a male (with his right arm stuck in a 90 degrees pose) and female (with her arms down). Humans hope that someone, in the inconceivable vastness of the universe and empty space, will find that like grain of sand called Voyager and hope the image will tell an intelligible story.
Boom! comes AI and learning to manipulate images in sophisticated graphic programs is no longer necessary: AI can almost understand speech, as long as your prompt is clear enough to this generation of AI. Right now, through AI, the bouncing of electric impulses through the brain can be visualized, probably interpreted and they certainly tell a story, even if it’s still an advanced form of Rorschach.
Where is Art in all this? It’s everywhere! We had idealized and invented stories of handsome kings and tortured men who were defending a religious faith, we had Duchamps and Warhols telling you to look around because anything can be art. We have abstract painting that complements your couch and rug, abstract paintings that hit you over the head and shout “I’m telling you something and that something is inside yourself!”.
I think an image is always about the story it tries to tell because in our heads, we hear a voice subtitling for us what our eyes can receive and our brains can translate. Animals who see different colors in the same flower we look at, probably have a different story of the world. Wales that hear at distances that cannot see, their brains would visit a “museum” in a concert hall, not a gallery.
How is out brain going to develop with all the new tools we have? Which value will images take in our lives? How is visual Art going to aid us in seeing someone else’s story, discover our inner one and how are we, the creators and observers of images will bridge the understanding of an image story with the unutterable story that only our “spirit” can “read”. (words fail me, as we go).
Character count: 3550 = 12.6 tweets. Words count: 761 = almost an image