More Human than Human & A World Inscribed

I was able to look at the subtitles for these videos and were easier to understand. I was able to stop copy my notes down successfully and play it again!

For the first video, More Human Than Human

It was quite interesting for me to figure out why art was around for such a long time. It began way before I was born myself. Images make us how to think, how we feel and they mold and define us. They are very highly influential to humans. You see certain types of images that helps promote advertisements. We see it in T.V and definitely around our surroundings. They have such a powerful hold on us. What these whole images have in common is a human form. This type of form is primary.

In this video, it uses an example of a gull chick. As soon as they are hatched their brains are stimulated not by the mother gull, but actually the red stripe on its beak. There was an experiment done using a stick with one stripe to see if these gull chicks would notice it. Certainly they did! There were more experiments done including a stick with multiple red stripes and sure enough they were even more stimulated and excited over this stick with three stripes than only one. There is an analogy here with the Venus sculpture with emphasized on the hips and the breasts.

The brains of the hunter and gatherers of the Venus producers exaggerated what mattered the most. They were living in the Iced Age, so features of warmth and fatness were highly desirable so their brains compelled them to exaggerate these features above others.

Egyptians were first settled humans to use images of the body extensively in their Art. The bodies don't have exaggerated features at all. All arms and feet were about the same size. Each part of the body was at the clearest angle. There were red grid lines that were found in a tomb which covered the entire body. Researchers analyzed this Grid recording numerous details. The figure was 19 squares tall and the feet were two and half squares long. The pupil of the eyes were one square off the center line. This whole concept was very important to the Egyptians. The Pyramids were designed with absolute precision which is a symbol of order that had risen from the desert.

The second video that I watched, A world Inscribed,

describes how hard of a Monk's life was. At that time there were the local lord who offered protection and different monasteries where the monks produced most of the books. Very few people knew how to read and write and was an extraordinary skill at the time. Monks were producing bibles to spread the work. But this spread of knowledge was slow and each book was written by hand. Average monastery had only 20 books. Spelling mistakes and errors corrupted the texts after many centuries. Letters would look like other letters, there were ink blot and caused the writer to leave out a line or paragraph.

Shortly after, literacy was needed for social development. Universities sprung up where students shared their bible and took notes together. This way multiple of books were copied at once.

Its really hard to imagine living at a time like this, where there are only shorthand of books. This tells us that knowledge is actually a gift to us. The ability to read and write is incredible. Without this ability we wouldn't be able to learn about the past at all!