Multi-Media: The Electronic Sensory Languages: A Return to Lascaux

Abstract

This person had begun see images, and with the development of imagery came the important mental process of seeing within the qualities of an image, such as a painting of an animal, the qualities of the animal as it existed in real time-space. Important objects were recorded in images in the form of both physical paintings on cave walls and mental images in the mind. The images were signifiers which made clear primordial knowledge of the world and opened the door linguistic reality. With the advent of the recorded image, humanity possessed the first technology of language. Recognizing appearances as visual expressions and utterances as audible expressions altered thinking because the recording of images gave people the opportunity examine reflectively the events recorded in images, relive an event symbolically, and develop more complex ideas. They acquired perception and not only knew about their world, but, through the recorded image, began know that they knew. Through language they could participate in the creation of what they knew through imagination. The Creek word poiisis means poetry, but it also means make or create. Giambattista Vico believed that the true and knowable must be made by man and that the wisdom of antiquity is best revealed in poetry. Primitive poetry was not only the igniting spark toward civilization but the prototype of man's making of language (5, p. 14). Poetry, like the paintings on the cave walls, was a technology for recording knowledge in language. The difference is that poetry as oral language is not recorded outside the body as painting is, and of course poetry is a word language and painting is a visual language. Yet poetry is similar the visual language in that it utilizes metaphors and similitudes as techniques for stimulating images which resemble that about which they are expressive. However, the images of poetry always remain abstract in that they are mental images, and not the concrete images found in paintings. With the technologies of painting and poetry, sight could be transformed aesthetically into visual language and utterance into oral language. These two systems of sight and sound languages had a commonality in imagery, and together they started humanity on the road acquiring reflective and rational self-knowledge. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin writes that humanity, with reflective self-awareness, now had the capacity to turn inward upon itself, take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistency and value; no longer merely know, but know oneself; no longer merely know, but know that one knows (1, pp. 174-175). Knowing involves two kinds of thinking: inductive and deductive. Inductive thinking is relating and synthesizing elements of experience into a unified whole. Inductive thinking is based on initial experience, and sensory information is transformed aesthetically into ideas which are complete and are capable of being examined for their own qualitative information. At this point ideas are known directly through the Transformational Aesthetic. Deductive thinking, the other half of the rational mind, creates information out of what is already known or assumed be true. People begin with the idea, and this idea structures how they perceive their encounter with experience. They analyze the application of the idea new situations. Information is perceived aesthetically in the matching of the ideas the qualities of the new situation. At this point ideas are known reflectively through the Perceptual Aesthetic. Through the Perceptual Aesthetic people not only know, but they now know that they know. The Perceptual Aesthetic gives a basis of imagery deductive thinking. The Transformational Aesthetic creates reality through synthesizing images and the Perceptual Aesthetic creates reality through analyzing images. The former discovers knowledge