Here is something that is really deepening itself into my thinking at the moment. I’m putting it up here because its a good way of making thinking visible in a documented and engagable way.
Two words.
Miniature Shields.
This shield is over 2000 years old. From the picture you can see that it is only 100mm long. Is this in essence what cinema is?
An engagement with scale? A toy (make believe) a votive offering (magic, ritual) a talisman? When we look at this shield, for a moment we are accessing the thought process of Iron age people.
Cinema too is an engagement with scale. First we make things tiny. The film frame is tiny. Then we make it massive, the screen (compared to the frame) is simply collossal.
I am inclined to think that the ‘imagination in a modeled reality’ that is present in these shields is a similar thing to what ‘cinema’ became in its early period of adaptation. Of course we can always find historical precedents for things of the present but here there seems a striking occurrence of a form of ‘media’. As miniaturizing puts material into a tactile scale it suspends the normal meaning of the object, making it ‘the object PLUS reference to another reality; faery folk, us as giants……
