The Infinite Canvas

From Cave Paintings to Virtual Spatialism

This text explores how technological advancements over the past 80 years have transformed the human phenomenological experience of space, offering a hermeneutic analysis of these historical transformations. It articulates space perception through the arts’ language and draws on the Lacanian dogma — “the unconscious is structured like a language” — to unveil how space mutually reflects and shapes our psyche. The paper first introduces the human prehistoric un-polarised perception of space through the analysis of cave paintings in dialogue with Joan Miró’s artistic attempts to return to this primaeval un-polarisation, defined as posthuman in its intra-active dynamics. In contrast, Miró’s contemporary artist, Lucio Fontana, is situated within technological advancements by paralleling the violent cut of the canvas to the violent atmosphere’s piercing of the V2 rocket in 1942. This techno-research of new spatial frontiers is defined as (trans)humanist un-polarisation operating within anthropocentric and expansionist frameworks. The two divergent art gestures highlight the paradoxical nature of technology, which simultaneously discovers / enframes space yet promises infinitude. Today’s virtual space is argued to continue the escapism that technology offers (and entrapment to which condemn): limitless space to explore, shape, and create within and from narcissistic desires conceptualised as counteracting the exploratory limitations of physical space and as a response to science’s deconstruction of the human-centred Genesis. The effort to re-centre the individual and establish a neo-Genesis is seen — psychoanalytically — as shielding the Ego from the Lacanian Real, embodied in the unfathomable outer space, threatening our existence by realising the grand scheme’s total indifference to us. The techno-colonisation of metaphysics in the fabrication of delusional (virtual) spaces is discussed as illusory structures: a resistance to a posthuman language seeking to articulate the desire’s surplus for being whole, aiming to reveal our importance as parts (and as much as) of a greater whole.