From cave to CAVE : Immersive environments in the paleocybernetic age

The present contribution aims at building a theoretical bridge between two types of environmental images: the ones created at the dawn of human image-making, namely cave art from the Upper Palaeolithic, and their contemporary counterparts made possible by Virtual Reality (henceforth VR) technologies (such as VR headsets or Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). The possibility to make a connection between these two so apparently distant visual cultures had been already envisaged by media theorist Gene Youngblood (1942-2021). In his seminal work Expanded Cinema (1970), the scholar stated that the end of the Industrial age would bring man to another stage, Cybernetics. More precisely, Youngblood coined the term «paleocybernetic» to have a useful conceptual tool that could describe the actual mediascape. In 1970, a search for the primitive potential and the layered ambitions of the more recent techniques seemed to meet, as if deep past and future would collapse together coming to answer the question on who we indeed are – and what we do when we make images. Following Youngblood’s intuition, this contribution aims to read in the light of the concept of paleocybernetics the most recent developments of Virtual Reality, which not by chance has repeatedly crossed the medial destiny of cave art. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the several VR transpositions of decorated caves that are not accessible to the general public reinforces the conceptual intertwining between these two kinds of environmental images. The reference here goes, among others, to the first attempts of Benjamin Britton, Virtual Lascaux (1995), to the most recent interactive experiences such as Memoria: Stories of La Garma (2019) by Rafael Pavon or The Dawn of Art (2020), developed by Google Arts and Culture on the Chauvet cave. These different interactive experiences are united by the desire to make visible through the tools of VR the cinematic and environmental character of prehistoric images, already highlighted archaeology. Furthermore, they show how image environmentalisation belongs to the visual vocabulary of the human from the very beginning.