Cave
CAVE
Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light.
Plato, Allegory of the Cave
The NeuroCave Collaborative:6 CAA faculty: Sara Mast (School of Art); Jessica Jellison & Bill Clinton (School of Architecture); Jason Bolte & Linda Antas (School of Music); Zach Hoffman (Film and Photography)4 Science/Engineering faculty: John Miller (Professor Emeritus, Neuroscience), Brittany Fasy (School of Computing), David L. Millman (School of Computing, Nowsta Engineer) and Chris Huvaere (TechLink Center)1 UMKC faculty: Barry Anderson, (UMKC art department chair and video artist)Science Advisor: Chris Comer (UM Dean of Humanities and Sciences and neuroscientist)Cave is a collaborative, interdisciplinary artscience installation that merges the mind of 35,000-year-old cave art with state-of-the-art brain research. Our team will create an interactive, multisensory work in which viewer-participant (VP) brainwaves (through the use of current neurofeedback technology) will generate light and sound in an immersive filmic and sonic environment that echoes cultural memory and connects our most rudimentary tools with our most technological ones. The VP informs and becomes part of the artwork, thus blurring the perceptual boundaries between creation and sensation, and unifying the internal and external cave.Project InspirationIn October, 2013, National Geographic published an article entitled Were the First Artists Mostly Women? (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-hndprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/) Handprints in eight cave sites in France and Spain were analyzed by Dean Snow of Penn State University, and three quarters of those handprints were left by women. This represents a new genesis of art history and women’s contribution to it. “People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why”, stated Dean Snow. Perhaps, instead of incantations for the ritual hunt, the cave paintings are humanity’s earliest expressions of empathy, mutuality and deep interdependence with the non-human world.Is our relationship to human-made technologies akin to the predator-prey relationship primary to early humans? As Kevin Kelly states in What Technology Wants, technology is “…a vital spirit that throws us forward or pushes against us. Not a thing, but a verb”. As we grow and unfold with our 21st century technological devices, a new shape shifting is taking place. The origin of art in the cave reminds us to honor and revere that which both sustains and preys upon us both within and without. By joining our oldest and most basic activity of mark making on a surface with today’s highly technological tools such as brainwave readers coded to collect neuroscientific data on co-variance, Cave reconsiders the intentions of humanity’s first artists and adds a new layer of questions to the layers that have accrued for thousands of years.The images we see of cave paintings are often misleading--the cave walls were not neutral supports for imagery, but instead provided natural folds as animal outlines to which a few strokes were added to supply the missing parts. The interaction between the interior, cavernous contours and surfaces of the cave and the artists was profound--the forms of the cave architecture itself were engaged as “living membranes between the realms” (David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave). Marc Azema, archaeologist at University of Toulouse Le-Mirail, FR, has studied the sequential nature of the cave drawings. In his book, La Prehistoire du Cinema, he concludes these are our first animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8exsw6yKXw&feature=player_embedded) Could the first artists, likely women, have been bringing these forms to life in the first animations, using the flickering torch light within the cave to create their movement? These paintings were not only humanity’s first known images, they were our first art installations, our first films and our first architectural spaces.Contact: Sara Mast smast@montana.edu 406-570-8953, for The NeuroCave Collaborative