Memory Theatre & Information Space

Week eight

Overview

The idea of interactivity usually associated with the computer, video games and new technologies has a much longer history. An old mnemonic technique of the memory theatre, which can be dated to Cicero 2 century BC, outlines the basic concept of information space and architecture.  

Memory Theatres were popular since the Roman times through the Middle Ages and further developed by neoplatonists during the Renaissance.   Giulio Camillo's (1480-1544) Memory Theatre is a well known example of this, even though it was never fully realized.  

Memory Theatres acted as storage spaces of memory or thought, navigated through and explored in the imagination.   They worked on the principle of association of desperate elements to construct a narrative and train the memory.   It was a dream of a total encyclopaedia and a model of spatial arrangement of knowledge, which heavily impacts on the recent approaches to spatial knowledge organization in computing.

Agnes Hegedues , Toni Dove , Judith Barry & Brad Miskell ,

Primary Reading

Dove, Toni 1994 Theater Without Actors: Immersion and Response in Installation , Leonardo, vol. 27, no. 4, p281-287

Matussek, Peter The Renaissance of the Theater of Memory

Method of loci

Malloy, Judy (ed) 2003 Women, Art and Technology , The MIT Press, Cambridge/London, Massachusetts/UK

More

B7 (1) Library, Map, City: Spatial Models of Knowledge

Bredekamp, Horst 1995 The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine , M Wiener Publishers, Princeton

Eco, Umberto 1988 An ars oblivionalis? Forget it! , PMLA 103, p 254-61

Engel, William, E 2001/2002 What's New in Mnemology , Connotations 11.2-3, p 241 - 61

Giuilo Camillo (1480 - 1544)

Giulio Camillo e il Teatro della Memoria

Maguire, Matthew 1986 The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo

Matussek, Peter The End(s) of Intertextuality

Recollecting "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," a novel by Umberto Eco

Yeates, Francis A The Art of Memory , Chicago Uni Press, Chicago