The Cave

During the summer of 2014, the Getty Trust launched an important new initiative in digital art history designed to help art historians and museum professionals to explore the opportunities and challenges of new and emergent technologies. Along with George Mason and UCLA, metaLAB hosted one of the workshops devised for this purpose: ours was entitled Beautiful Data and involved some 23 scholars, curators, technologists, and designers. The program has been renewed, so a new and improved Beautiful Data II is now in preparation, along with analogous workshops at George Mason and UCLA. As a token of the importance that the Getty attributes to the digital turn in art history and cultural history writ large, the Trust invited Johanna Drucker and myself to contribute brief prefatory essays to its 2014 Annual Report. These have now been published at http://www.getty.edu/about/governance/trustreport/2014/index.html also available in a downloadable pdf.

My contribution is entitled “The Scale of the Human Record.” It begins with a rumination on Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the 2010 documentary in which,under difficult conditions, the German director set out to explore the remarkable complex of Aurignacian paintings discovered in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in 1994. It then moves on to consider questions of cognitive scale:

In the wake of this vicarious journey to the beginnings of human culture, I was left reflecting on a question of scale that informs much of my current speculative thinking and experimental practice in the domain of digital art and humanities. The stories that the Chauvet parietal paintings tell, like the story that unfolds in frame after frame of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is closely tied to the scale of the human body and its perceptual apparatus. Both traffic in objects and events that fall within the framework of ordinary, possible, or plausible human experience; objects and events that humans can somehow see, hear, smell, taste, or touch; animals that can eat others or be eaten; tools by means of which such creatures can be subdued from a safe distance; corridors available to the ancient hunter or modern spelunker; image arrays that, no matter how big or small, remain readily graspable by human eyes. Whether as individuals or collectivities, we typically find meaning in what is available to us as experience and, accordingly, it is on this very scale that human experience and the cultural record of human experience have been shaped. One might say that, in this one regard, little has changed from the Aurignacian era to our own, despite the many ways in which our perceptual faculties have been extended by instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, microphones, and sensors.

The essay goes on to show how even an apparently simple site such as Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc can contain spatial, temporal, and material complexities that defy our cognitive abilities unless these are aided by tools and techniques that expand their powers. It concludes by extending this lesson to the data rich caverns of our own era:

In the immersive data caves of the twenty-first century, the same sorts of complexities and opportunities abound that made this ice age database the worthy subject of Herzog’s probing eye. They arise at the level of understanding large systems in all of their sometimes overwhelming intricacy; and they arise alike at the level of grappling with the beauty and significance of individual objects as well as the particulars that make them up. This is not an either/or proposition with respect to traditional practices of art-historical inquiry, but rather an expansion of their scope, reach, and even audience. As open content initiatives like those undertaken by the Getty expose ever vaster portions of the cultural record to public view, the tools and tasks of storytelling must themselves expand to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the Digital Age.