Paintings can teach us about technology. The electronic screens we stare at all day are actually by-products of paintings. And I don’t mean in the sense their purpose is to display art. Rather, I mean paintings laid the groundwork to understanding how to technically make digital screens. Georges Seurat is probably most known for this correlation. By simplifying visual perception to thousands of points, his work was an ideological precursor to phosphors (similar to pixels). It comes to no surprise that 13 years after Seurat unveiled this piece,
the first CRT was invented that utilized this conceptual approach to vision on a screen. There are plenty of conceptual precursors in paintings that led to scientific, financial, or political revelations. Which is why current concepts from the Fine Art world is typically ~20 years ahead of current practices and discoveries.