The condition that has enabled the biological development, and functioning, of human language is that of face-to-face communication in the shared visual field of the interlocutors. From a certain point onwards in history, humans began to develop technologies that modified this original situation. These technologies externalized and fixed the product of vision a priori, through the drawn and/or painted image, and then through words, in writing. The consequences have been enormous: communication can now occur without an interlocutor and in the absence of a shared visual field; it is possible to share things visually without being present and without being able to communicate; and so on and so forth. These new conditions and possibilities generate the many forms of communication and expression that we have come to know in the course of history.

The Shaman that painted in the Palaeolithic cave, the Sumerian scribe, Pope Gregory Magno, Leonardo da Vinci, Eadweard Muybridge, the inventor of motion picture, and Ivan Sutherland, the inventor of virtual reality - it is they who in this book reveal to the reader just how much that evolution was anything but linear. Instead, these changes are the outcome of various fusions and clashes, divorces and reunions, driven over time by the evolving technology; or better, by the simple and often fortuitous fact of its modification.