The last issue of the MIT Technology Review, which covers September and October of this year, reached me by post this morning. As I flipped through it, I came across an article that looked a bit odd, at least for a magazine dedicated to technology. Entitled “Motion Pictures,” it came with a number of unusual illustrations. “Technology is now allowing artists to do something they’ve aspired to since the stone age: make their paintings move,” runs the byline. Stone age? Really? Written by a certain Martin Gayford, it starts in medias res. “By and large, visual art has always been defined as static,” the abstract artist Frank Stella observed to him in 1998, “but the tradition has always been to use illusion to create a sense of motion.” Even tens of thousands of years ago, artists have attempted to show the world in motion, the argument goes. “If something moves, that’s how you can tell it’s alive,” Stella is quoted again. The rest of the article is dedicated to various attempts of artists to animate their paintings, but I went straight for the last paragraph, where the stone age predictably pops up again. “The aurochs, stags, and horses on the walls of Lascaux were painted to be seen in the flickering torchlight, and would have shimmered with apparent movement,” Gayford argues. “Yet, because they are frozen in a moment, each animal still possesses a specificity, a quality of being captured, that animation may find difficult to replicate.” The word he himself italicizes negates the underlying thesis of the article, of course. Capturing was the word back then, indeed. And there were no artists, but shamans capturing and subduing the world of spirits for their enthralled tribesmen assembled in deep caves. Motion pictures were farthest from the shamans’ minds in the stone age. Come to think of it, motion pictures would frighten them out of their wits. Pace Stella, creating a sense of motion was a dream of the early Twenty First Century. And stopping all motion was the dream of the stone age for untold thousands of years.