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Peter Weibel «The Wall, the Curtain (Border, the) technical terminology also: Lascaux»
Peter Weibel, «The Wall, the Curtain (Border, the) technical terminology also: Lascaux», 1993
© Peter Weibel


 Peter Weibel
«The Wall, the Curtain (Border, the) technical terminology also: Lascaux»

Plato's allegory of the cave is interpreted anew: the interface as curtain.
Peter Weibel

The cave drawing of Lascaux, which represent the climax of Ice Age cave art around 15,000 B.C., is stored as an image in the computer and projected onto a screen by a data beamer. If a viewer moves in front of the screen, his image is captured by a camera and, after a short delay, appears as a distorted silhouette in the image on the screen. There, any body movement triggers image distortions. The viewer becomes part of what he observes. Weibel takes the cave painting of Lascaux as the occasion to design a new model of an interface, which molds our current idea of perception of the world and space.

A later, 1999 version of the work was also realized under the title 'Wall of Lascaux'.