Life

Scribit robot draws the world’s oldest painting to your wall

April 17, 2020

PARIS — At a time when public exhibitions are inaccessible and we must all stay at home, Scribit brings humankind’s oldest paintings to your wall, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the Chauvet Caves in France.

The drawing — inspired by one of the 32,000-year-old cave paintings — aims to make the restricted Cave accessible to all.

The 25th anniversary of the discovery of the world’s oldest painting in the Chauvet Cave in Southern France; a celebration of curiosity and adventure, has coincided with the current worldwide lockdown that has forced us all to discover new ways of enjoying our time.

At a moment when home is the safest place, Scribit — the write&erase robot developed by Carlo Ratti Associati — takes inspiration from our ancestors to bring the masterpieces of Chauvet’s 32,000-year-old paintings to your wall to bring you the excitement of exploration and the magic of rock art.

The latest installment of the Scribit Originals series aims to raise awareness of the Chauvet project and the work that goes into preserving the delicate cave paintings, highlighting their importance as records of our collective history.

People can use the Scribit robot to reproduce the “Grand Cheval de Chauvet”, one of mankind’s most striking artworks, inaccessible to the public since its discovery 25 years ago. The project represents an unprecedented encounter between rock art and robotics, drawing continuity between human expression across the ages and technologies.

The drawing will be available to Scribit users and on https://scribit.design/pages/app from April 16, 2020.

Scribit — which was launched in 2018 with one of the top crowdfunding campaigns ever and which was recently named among Time’s inventions of the year — is a write&erase robot that can turn any vertical surface into a low-refresh screen on which to display visual content.

Functioning as a "printer for walls," Scribit ushers in a new way of presenting art and allows users to instantly personalize a vertical plane.

Scribit’s invention was inspired by Werner Herzog’s movie “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, entirely filmed within the Chauvet Cave. Scribit is designed to allow users to draw on their walls in the same way our ancestors did with their own tools tens of thousands of years ago: man marking walls to make his home.

The cave paintings at Chauvet can be considered amongst the world’s great works of art; they are the earliest recorded marks made by man and more than twice as old as the next oldest paintings known to us.

In a time when our curiosity is flattened by boredom, fast-paced scrolling and seconds-long attention spans, Scribit aims to reduce our screen time, acting as a low-refresh screen to provide an analog format for consuming digitally produced and shared content.

Scribit will recreate the Cave’s ‘forgotten dreams’ as it follows the gestures of the hands of the prehistoric cave painters, placing the user into the vein of history that flows from Chauvet into our homes today to bring us closer to our collective past.

This is the tenth installment of the Scribit Originals series, which aims to bring artworks by the world’s leading artists, designers, and public intellectuals to the Scribit platform in order to share knowledge, a story, cause or concept.

This visual content for your wall will be featured in a curated online collection and available for download by the growing community of Scribit users. — Scribit team


April 17, 2020
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