Can media exist if there is no one around to hear it? Can painting on a wall deep within a cave-even if it is somewhere that may only have been seen by a few handfuls of people over the past 32,000 years- be considered media if it is not public?
At its core, media is the exercise of storytelling. Whether that story is told in 3D on a screen at your local multiplex with a $200 dollar budget, or done with a stick on an empty rock wall the goal is the same- to share your life experience with others. To entertain and inform people going through the same human emotions that we all share and evoke them in a way that we hope will stand the test of time should be the goal of any great storyteller.
On a fundamental level, the Chauvet cave paintings may be the purest form of storytelling that we humans will ever achieve. The stories told in depictions of horses, rhinos and mammoths were of sheer survival. Done by a group of people trying to survive in an environment harsher than any that a Hollywood screenwriter could ever fathom, these stories told the most simple and basic of human truths- how they found and killed food to survive, how they sometimes lost the battle with wild beasts and how they tried to pass the knowledge of both on to those coming after them is storytelling at its simplest roots. No Hollywood blockbuster or best-selling novel created in the 21st century will ever give you the knowledge so fundamentally necessary to live that was expressed in these paintings.
Have they stood the test of time? 32,000 years later they are still fascinating humans, so that is obviously a resounding yes. If the Chauvet cave paintings are not media, than the human race has no hope of ever truly creating anything worthy of the name.
At its core, media is the exercise of storytelling. Whether that story is told in 3D on a screen at your local multiplex with a $200 dollar budget, or done with a stick on an empty rock wall the goal is the same- to share your life experience with others. To entertain and inform people going through the same human emotions that we all share and evoke them in a way that we hope will stand the test of time should be the goal of any great storyteller.
On a fundamental level, the Chauvet cave paintings may be the purest form of storytelling that we humans will ever achieve. The stories told in depictions of horses, rhinos and mammoths were of sheer survival. Done by a group of people trying to survive in an environment harsher than any that a Hollywood screenwriter could ever fathom, these stories told the most simple and basic of human truths- how they found and killed food to survive, how they sometimes lost the battle with wild beasts and how they tried to pass the knowledge of both on to those coming after them is storytelling at its simplest roots. No Hollywood blockbuster or best-selling novel created in the 21st century will ever give you the knowledge so fundamentally necessary to live that was expressed in these paintings.
Have they stood the test of time? 32,000 years later they are still fascinating humans, so that is obviously a resounding yes. If the Chauvet cave paintings are not media, than the human race has no hope of ever truly creating anything worthy of the name.
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