Art 1
Lab assignment
The Day Picture were Born
This documentary persuades us that pictures started to appear when humans have creative explosions. The early pictures can be traced back till 35,000 years ago where pre-historical cave paintings were made. At first, some suggested the hunting theory motivates human first being to create pictures. Since all paintings were only related to hunting, people assumed that the paintings may increase the chances of success in the eyes of those people. On the other hand, they used those to educating the young. However, there weren't paintings of other animals but rather oxen. Moreover, there are tight spots, abstract random shapes and pattern within the paintings which caused them to be more mysterious. Therefore, the hunting theory does not establish. In order to find out how pictures were born, we have to understand what a picture is. A collection of lines, dots, colors can represent as picture. Then we need to consider what pre-historical people usually do in their daily life so to look for clues that relate to the first paintings. There's a religion ritual which may resolve the mysterious. The religion was built around traveling the spiritual world. As the priest entered the spiritual world, he would experience spiritual trance, seeing Z-zag hues, dots and grids. The host wanted to prove that the priest saw was true, thus, he went for a visual experiment. As a result, he has hallucination of tight spots, abstract random shapes and patterns. He concluded the pre-historical people were familiar with the images that their brains producing and project them on the wall. Also, they nailed the 2-D pictures (oxen) which are producing in their minds and make them permanent. Yet, about 12,000 years ago, people stopped painting in caves and painting moved to places outside as they switched from hunting to farming. It brought the greatest transformation to human history. The visual experiment is very