異域文化 How Art Made The World 人、藝術(shù)、世界 01

There's something we do hundreds of times a day without even noticing it. It's an ability that we utterly depend on in our lives, and we take it for granted. Just watch.

We see some lines and can give them meaning. We can tell one shape from another. And we understand that an arrangement of colors can represent something. The ability to read images is an essential part of our lives. But what if we didn't have this ability? Imagine we couldn't understand images, what would our world be like?

Well for a start, images would never have been invented, we would've lost something we totally rely on, life would be impossible, and our world would be unrecognizable. But at some point in our ancient past, that's what the world looked like, imageless. Now of course pictures dominate our lives. Well, this is the extraordinary story of how we humans discovered the power of images and how they created the world we live in today.

How long has it taken for you to realise that I'm drawing a horse? A second? A fraction of a second? We can tell what a two-dimensional image represents almost instantaneously without even having to think about it. I'm not much of an artist, but even I can arrange a collection of pencil lines on a piece of paper, so you see what I want you to see. And I don't do just horses. I could draw almost anything in the world. And you'd probably guess what it was. But there must have been some point in our human story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant.