In 2010, Werner Herzog was among the lucky few to be given permission to enter the recently rediscovered Chauvet Cave in the south of France. In just six days he made a stunning documentary film about its 32,000-year-old cave paintings. Timo Feldhaus looks back at the beginnings of art through a flat Retina Display and soon drifts back to the present – to the image archives of Corbis.

When the Vienna Actionists urinated, masturbated, and vomited at an event titled “Art and Revolution” in Vienna University’s Lecture Hall 1 in 1968, the proceedings were accompanied by a lecture on the relationship between speech and thought by the then thirty-two-year-old Oswald Wiener. One year later his literary montage die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, a novel) was published. With its excurses on linguistics and cybernetics, it now reads as an astonishing foreshadowing of the Internet and virtual reality. Later, Wiener turned to the figure of the dandy, who maintains his difference from machines by cultivating a practice of self-observation. Hans-Christian Dany visited him at his home in southeast Austria to talk about the peculiar standstill of art and science in the digital age.