@kevn
Thank you for the response.
I’ll try to clarify my point.
To the one making the early cave drawings, sure, they may have served the purpose of expression. What that expression was intended to do, could be wide ranging. I’m speaking more to the viewers of that image. Creative/artistic/historical narrative, whatever the reason behind it, they still exist as a record. Something was important enough to be recorded. There was a drawing at the end of it. This drawing, it is theorized, was not limited merely by technical ability, but also by limits of visual perception.
We have lived with these produced images for a very, very long time.
And I would agree that visual and auditory abilities evolved in parallel to aid in survival.
However, we have lived with pictures a lot longer than we have lived with recorded sound. Our ability to see has had, over millennia, far more stimulus than our auditory abilities.
Our evolution has been driven by external factors placing a demand on our biological abilities. The reproduction of recorded sound is now at a far greater resolution than our use of our ears have needed to be able to decipher.
As we are an ever changing and dynamic creature, it would stand to reason that as greater stimulus is being presented to out senses, that our senses will continue to evolve in order to register these higher levels of sound.
And as far as what this has to do with survival, I suspect that region between our reptilian and mid brains will only register a new external stimulus and try to “understand” it and if it is a threat or not. But in order to be able to do that, it needs to be able to decipher it. And in order to do that, our hearing needs to evolve.
Photography as we know it today, is also a very new medium. And it has changed how we in fact see the world. Even then Camera Obscura, which goes back much further, also changed how we view the world. (Only it doesn’t deal with time in the same way a traditional camera does).
I tend to believe that everything we do that takes something that resides in the very intangible inner world of humans, and makes that into something tangible to be shared with others, is as you stated, an expression. What is left, is a record of that expression. Time, will tend to shift the purpose of that object, and place some form of value to it.
Take the photographer Karl Blussfelt or example. Spent years documenting plants. He wished to shed light on the structure of plants and his photographs were used as teaching tools at first. Only later, were they “elevated” to the stature of “art”. Whatever they were, or are now, they are a record. Playback of sounds, which requires that they be recorded, where we have the ability to play the same thing over and over again ad nauseam has put a new kind of strain on our hearing. This has only been possible since the advent of recorded sound.
And no, I’m not suggesting super hearing, or “golden ears”, but rather a collective shift in how we hear as a global phenomenon.
And the ongoing “science says it isn’t possible”argument is tiresome. Science is not a static thing, it’s a massive structure with one bit being added to another as new information becomes possible to understand. Hence my reference to Maxwells equations above. When the argument is presented that “science says it isn’t so”, it’s a very limited outlook. The phrase should be “our current scientific knowledge suggests that it shouldn’t be possible”.
Thank you for the response.
I’ll try to clarify my point.
To the one making the early cave drawings, sure, they may have served the purpose of expression. What that expression was intended to do, could be wide ranging. I’m speaking more to the viewers of that image. Creative/artistic/historical narrative, whatever the reason behind it, they still exist as a record. Something was important enough to be recorded. There was a drawing at the end of it. This drawing, it is theorized, was not limited merely by technical ability, but also by limits of visual perception.
We have lived with these produced images for a very, very long time.
And I would agree that visual and auditory abilities evolved in parallel to aid in survival.
However, we have lived with pictures a lot longer than we have lived with recorded sound. Our ability to see has had, over millennia, far more stimulus than our auditory abilities.
Our evolution has been driven by external factors placing a demand on our biological abilities. The reproduction of recorded sound is now at a far greater resolution than our use of our ears have needed to be able to decipher.
As we are an ever changing and dynamic creature, it would stand to reason that as greater stimulus is being presented to out senses, that our senses will continue to evolve in order to register these higher levels of sound.
And as far as what this has to do with survival, I suspect that region between our reptilian and mid brains will only register a new external stimulus and try to “understand” it and if it is a threat or not. But in order to be able to do that, it needs to be able to decipher it. And in order to do that, our hearing needs to evolve.
Photography as we know it today, is also a very new medium. And it has changed how we in fact see the world. Even then Camera Obscura, which goes back much further, also changed how we view the world. (Only it doesn’t deal with time in the same way a traditional camera does).
I tend to believe that everything we do that takes something that resides in the very intangible inner world of humans, and makes that into something tangible to be shared with others, is as you stated, an expression. What is left, is a record of that expression. Time, will tend to shift the purpose of that object, and place some form of value to it.
Take the photographer Karl Blussfelt or example. Spent years documenting plants. He wished to shed light on the structure of plants and his photographs were used as teaching tools at first. Only later, were they “elevated” to the stature of “art”. Whatever they were, or are now, they are a record. Playback of sounds, which requires that they be recorded, where we have the ability to play the same thing over and over again ad nauseam has put a new kind of strain on our hearing. This has only been possible since the advent of recorded sound.
And no, I’m not suggesting super hearing, or “golden ears”, but rather a collective shift in how we hear as a global phenomenon.
And the ongoing “science says it isn’t possible”argument is tiresome. Science is not a static thing, it’s a massive structure with one bit being added to another as new information becomes possible to understand. Hence my reference to Maxwells equations above. When the argument is presented that “science says it isn’t so”, it’s a very limited outlook. The phrase should be “our current scientific knowledge suggests that it shouldn’t be possible”.