I. MEMORY AND SPACE
Space is not simply a geometric ‘thing out there’. We are born with sight and sound, touch, taste and smell ready to initiate our particular construction of it. Space would not be perceptible without objects, textures, sounds. The sonic arts have tended to separate out taste and smell (although they have crept back in in recent more open social musical spaces) – and touch, too, unless you are a performer.
But memory is also spatial in two senses. Neuroscience is slowly unlocking the secrets of the most complex system observable by us – the human brain. But the nature of memory within the brain is not much understood – except that the questions are becoming more sophisticated and it is evidently distributed in many locations. But there is also a deeper link which has been exploited over some thousands of years – most extensively before writing (and more specifically printing) allowed us a short cut.
This is best described in classical, mediaeval and renaissance practices of mapping places, images and other objects of memory onto an imaginary stage in the mind – the so-called Memory Theatre. This was most especially examined in Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory (1966/1992 [Reference 4]). Starting from ideas of rhetoric inherited directly from the Greeks through Roman sources we start from the idea that natural
memory can be improved or augmented through the exercise of ‘artificial memory’. This is created from places and images. A place (locus) is easily memorised – a construction, a characteristic location. Images are
‘forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember’ [Reference 4: p.22]. There have been developed rules for places and rules for images. The loci relate to each other such they can be walked through in the imagination and even a particular building is to be seen as the best recepticle for the totality of the loci. Each fifth locus is given a particular mark in its characteristic. The building should be empty since crowds might distract! This allows us to construct two kinds of artificial memory - memory for things and memory for words. ‘Things’ are not objects in the contemporary sense but can include the subjects of speech - ‘the ideas we are trying to express’ - while words are simply (but importantly) a vehicle to convey that and often have to be memorised in the ‘correct’ order. In brief, the art of artificial memory lies in the direct association of image with locus and the ability to recall one through ‘visiting’ the other. By the Renaissance period the building within which the memory locations were found was very often constructed as a kind of theatre with five doors, five columns and other easily memorised characteristics. Yates discusses many of these examples and their complex historical interconnections – including highly dangerous rivalries, accusations of magic, heresy and the like – such as those of Giordano Bruno (late 16th C) and Robert Fludd (early 17th C).
http://www.smc08.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=39
Space is not simply a geometric ‘thing out there’. We are born with sight and sound, touch, taste and smell ready to initiate our particular construction of it. Space would not be perceptible without objects, textures, sounds. The sonic arts have tended to separate out taste and smell (although they have crept back in in recent more open social musical spaces) – and touch, too, unless you are a performer.
But memory is also spatial in two senses. Neuroscience is slowly unlocking the secrets of the most complex system observable by us – the human brain. But the nature of memory within the brain is not much understood – except that the questions are becoming more sophisticated and it is evidently distributed in many locations. But there is also a deeper link which has been exploited over some thousands of years – most extensively before writing (and more specifically printing) allowed us a short cut.
This is best described in classical, mediaeval and renaissance practices of mapping places, images and other objects of memory onto an imaginary stage in the mind – the so-called Memory Theatre. This was most especially examined in Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory (1966/1992 [Reference 4]). Starting from ideas of rhetoric inherited directly from the Greeks through Roman sources we start from the idea that natural
memory can be improved or augmented through the exercise of ‘artificial memory’. This is created from places and images. A place (locus) is easily memorised – a construction, a characteristic location. Images are
‘forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember’ [Reference 4: p.22]. There have been developed rules for places and rules for images. The loci relate to each other such they can be walked through in the imagination and even a particular building is to be seen as the best recepticle for the totality of the loci. Each fifth locus is given a particular mark in its characteristic. The building should be empty since crowds might distract! This allows us to construct two kinds of artificial memory - memory for things and memory for words. ‘Things’ are not objects in the contemporary sense but can include the subjects of speech - ‘the ideas we are trying to express’ - while words are simply (but importantly) a vehicle to convey that and often have to be memorised in the ‘correct’ order. In brief, the art of artificial memory lies in the direct association of image with locus and the ability to recall one through ‘visiting’ the other. By the Renaissance period the building within which the memory locations were found was very often constructed as a kind of theatre with five doors, five columns and other easily memorised characteristics. Yates discusses many of these examples and their complex historical interconnections – including highly dangerous rivalries, accusations of magic, heresy and the like – such as those of Giordano Bruno (late 16th C) and Robert Fludd (early 17th C).
http://www.smc08.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=39
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