Creativity
Creating in the Dark
Cave paintings, AI, and making something you can't fully see yet.
In 1991 I was studying painting in Lacoste, France, on a semester abroad during art school. When the semester ended, a few of us set out to backpack around Europe, with the Lascaux cave paintings among the first things we headed out to find. We made the trek, which was epic, and when we got there, it was closed. The original cave had been closed off to the public since 1963. This is how we suffered through life before smartphones, GPS and Google business listings. Regardless, a spark was lit inside me that has fueled a lifelong fascination with these earliest forms of art.
I've followed every new discovery since. Paintings, pictographs, anything that gives us clues to how we lived so long ago, before the dawn of writing. These images speak to me because they feel so primal and yet so intentional.
What was the inspiration? Why did they make them? Why did they crawl so far back into caves to make these elaborate, epic images? Were they ceremonial? Historical? Religious? Did whole tribes travel back into the dark to see them? Who were they left for, and what purpose did they serve?
For most of those questions, the honest answer is still: we don't know for certain, and may never. I suspect it has something to do with our attraction to feelings of awe.
That got me thinking… Could I build a way to explore the images, the places, and the connections between them, and bring a little bit of that awe into the experience? Could I get a little closer to that feeling I had gone looking for in France: standing inside the cave, viewing the images above and around me, smelling and hearing the life of the cave, sensing the time between me and those creators?
When I asked Claude to let people experience the paintings as if they were in the caves, I wasn't sure what it would do with that instruction. It came back with a torch. And audio. And a little awe.
This changed the way I looked. Within that small pool of light, I noticed overlapping heads, animals locked horn to horn, details I might have passed over while taking in the whole wall. The points of interest gave me places to stop, look a little longer, and learn something about what was in front of me.
I had asked for atmosphere and found myself paying attention differently. And I got here by thinking about how to convey a sense of place, not just show the images. These aren't paintings hung on a gallery wall. I was delighted by how much more I could discover through that shift in experience.
That's part of what interests me about AI: it can be a bridge to different ways of seeing.
