A Derivative History of Art
From Lascaux to Web Installation: Outline Creation, Remote Connectivity, and the Ontology of Value
This paper proposes a reinterpretation of art history not as a history of representation but as a history of derivative spaces. While conventional art history has focused on images, styles, and aesthetic forms, this study argues that a deeper continuity underlies the development of artistic practices. From prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary networked art, artistic production has consistently functioned as a mechanism through which absent entities become operative within reality.
This paper introduces the concept of outline creation to describe this process. An outline is not a representation of an object but a condition through which an object, value, meaning, or reality may emerge. Through this perspective, cave paintings, religious icons, perspective systems, financial abstractions, photography, communication networks, and digital interfaces can be understood as manifestations of a common historical tendency. The paper concludes by positioning the interface art of bigakusha-haha and the concept of Web Installation as a contemporary realization of this long historical trajectory.
1. Introduction: The Black Box of Art History
The origin of this inquiry lies in a simple question.
Why does a work of art acquire value?
Modern art history provides numerous explanations concerning style, technique, institutions, and cultural context. Yet these explanations often leave untouched the deeper question of how value itself comes into existence.
The history of art frequently appears as a history of objects.
However, objects alone do not explain why certain forms become culturally operative while others do not.
The present study begins with the hypothesis that art history contains a hidden dimension—a black box of value production.
This black box is not a conspiracy, nor is it a secret institution.
Rather, it is the largely invisible process through which reality, meaning, and value become collectively operative.
2. Lascaux and the Origin of Derivative Space
Art history traditionally begins with prehistoric cave paintings such as those found in Lascaux Cave.
From a modern perspective, these images appear to be representations of animals.
Yet this interpretation may be misleading.
For the communities that produced them, the images were unlikely to function as aesthetic depictions in the contemporary sense.
Instead, they may have operated as conditions through which relationships with animals became possible.
The cave image does not merely depict the animal.
It creates a field in which the animal can become present.
In this sense, the image functions as an outline.
The outline is not the animal itself.
It is the condition of emergence.
Art therefore originates not as representation but as the construction of derivative space: a space where absent realities acquire operative force.
3. Sacred Images and the Medieval Interface
This structure persists throughout religious art.
Ancient temples, Byzantine icons, medieval frescoes, and pilgrimage images were not primarily concerned with visual accuracy.
Their purpose was mediation.
An icon does not reproduce God.
Rather, it establishes a relationship between the believer and the divine.
The image functions as an interface.
Its significance lies not in what it shows but in what it connects.
Religious art therefore operates within a derivative logic.
Yet through images, rituals, and architecture, the absent becomes socially and psychologically present.
Art becomes a technology of remote connectivity.
4. The Renaissance: Perspective and Abstraction
The Renaissance is commonly celebrated as the triumph of realism.
Linear perspective is often described as a technique for representing space accurately.
However, perspective accomplished something more profound.
Perspective transformed space into a calculable system.
At approximately the same historical moment, Italian merchants developed increasingly sophisticated forms of accounting and double-entry bookkeeping.
Perspective abstracted visual space.
Bookkeeping abstracted economic value.
Both innovations converted reality into systems of relations that could be manipulated independently of immediate physical presence.
The Renaissance therefore marks a decisive expansion of derivative space.
Reality becomes increasingly governable through abstract outlines.
5. Crusades, Credit, and the Mobility of Value
The Crusades accelerated the development of long-distance financial systems.
A pilgrim or knight no longer needed to transport physical wealth across dangerous territories.
Value could be deposited in one location and retrieved elsewhere through letters of credit and institutional trust.
What circulated was not gold.
What circulated was a claim upon gold.
This transformation represents a fundamental derivative operation.
An absent value acquires practical force.
The same logic can be observed in religious culture.
Pilgrims unable to visit sacred locations could encounter relics, icons, or symbolic substitutes.
Presence becomes transferable.
Reality itself becomes increasingly mediated.
6. Photography and the Industrialization of Presence
The nineteenth century introduced photography.
Photography is often interpreted as a technology of representation.
Yet its deeper significance lies elsewhere.
Photography made remote realities immediately available.
Through photographs, individuals encountered places they had never visited and events they had never witnessed.
The rise of news agencies transformed this process further.
Images became transmissible across vast distances.
Presence became reproducible.
The photograph therefore functions not simply as a record.
It is a derivative mechanism through which absence becomes actionable.
7. Cinema and the Temporal Derivative
Cinema extends this logic into time.
The viewer encounters events that are neither present nor contemporaneous.
Past moments become active within the present.
Future expectations are organized through narrative anticipation.
Cinema thus creates a derivative temporal space.
Time itself becomes manipulable.
The spectator inhabits a reality generated through the orchestration of absence and presence.
8. Modern Art and the Crisis of Representation
The emergence of modern art reveals an increasing awareness of these structures.
Artists gradually abandon the assumption that art must represent reality.
The ready-made, abstraction, conceptual art, and installation practices all challenge the traditional relation between object and meaning.
The artwork increasingly functions as a framework rather than an image.
Attention shifts from representation to conditions.
Art becomes concerned with the production of reality rather than its depiction.
This transition marks the emergence of a self-reflective derivative consciousness within art itself.
9. Networks, the Internet, and Web Installation
The internet represents the most extensive derivative space yet created.
Websites are not objects.
They are nodes within networks of relations.
Their significance derives from connectivity rather than material presence.
The development of Web Installation by bigakusha-haha emerges within this context.
Web Installation does not treat the internet as a medium for displaying artworks.
Rather, the network itself becomes the artwork.
The artwork is no longer an object to be viewed.
It becomes a condition of encounter.
The interface replaces the image.
Connectivity replaces representation.
The central artistic problem shifts from showing reality to designing the circumstances through which reality may emerge.
10. Derivative Ontology and Human Existence
This historical trajectory reveals a broader anthropological principle.
Human beings do not merely inhabit reality.
They continuously construct derivative spaces.
Myths, religions, markets, states, currencies, artworks, communication systems, and digital networks all operate through the same fundamental mechanism.
They allow absent entities to produce real effects.
The shaman, the priest, the merchant, the scientist, the financial engineer, and the artist all participate in this process.
Their shared activity is the creation of outlines.
An outline is not a representation.
It is a condition through which reality becomes possible.
11. Art After Representation
From this perspective, the task of contemporary art is not the production of images.
Nor is it the critique of institutions.
The fundamental task of art is to generate awareness of the processes through which realities are produced.
Modern societies often forget that their values, systems, and structures are human constructions.
These constructions become naturalized and sacred.
Art functions as an interruption of this forgetting.
It creates encounters with the outlines through which realities emerge.
The artwork therefore becomes an interface for recognizing the generative conditions of existence itself.
Art history has generally been written as a history of representation.
This paper proposes an alternative narrative.
Art history can be understood as a history of derivative spaces.
From prehistoric cave paintings to networked environments, artistic practices have repeatedly constructed conditions through which absent realities acquire operative force.
The central continuity is not image-making.
Seen from this perspective, the history of art converges with the histories of religion, finance, communication, and technology.
All participate in the production of derivative spaces through which human beings organize reality.
The significance of contemporary interface art lies precisely in making this process visible.
Art no longer represents reality.
It reveals how reality itself is generated.
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