The 25th anniversary of the discovery of the world’s oldest painting in the Chauvet Cave in Southern France; a celebration of curiosity and adventure, has coincided with the current worldwide lockdown that has forced us all to discover new ways of enjoying our time. 

At a moment when home is the safest place, Scribit takes inspiration from our ancestors to bring the masterpieces of Chauvet’s 32,000-year-old paintings to your wall to bring you the excitement of exploration and the magic of rock art. The latest installment of the Scribit Originals series aims to raise awareness of the Chauvet project and the work that goes into preserving the delicate cave paintings, highlighting their importance as records of our collective history.

People can use the Scribit robot to reproduce a fragment of the “Panel of Horses”, one of mankind’s most striking artworks, inaccessible to the public since its discovery twenty-five years ago. The project represents an unprecedented encounter between rock art and robotics, drawing continuity between human expression across the ages and technologies. The drawing will be available to Scribit users on The Scribit App from April 16th, 2020. 

Scribit’s invention was inspired by Werner Herzog’s movie “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, entirely filmed within the Chauvet Cave. Scribit is designed to allow users to draw on their walls in the same way our ancestors did with their own tools tens of thousands of years ago: man-marking walls to make his home. 

The cave paintings at Chauvet can be considered amongst the world’s great works of art; they are the earliest recorded marks made by man and more than twice as old as the next oldest paintings known to us. In a time when our curiosity is flattened by boredom, fast-paced scrolling and seconds-long attention spans, Scribit aims to reduce our screen time, acting as a low-refresh screen to provide an analog format for consuming digitally produced and shared content. Scribit will recreate the Cave’s ‘forgotten dreams’ as it follows the gestures of the hands of the prehistoric cave painters, placing the user into the vein of history that flows from Chauvet into our homes today to bring us closer to our collective past.