Memory Theatre in the Digital Age

Abstract

Forgotten for centuries, they now appear more up-to-date than ever: the Memory Theatres of the 16th and 17th century. Created to revitalize the scholastically stifled memory culture of the Middle Ages and to counteract the sensory deprivation of the dawning age of print, Memory Theatres have been rediscovered by information designers and artists who develop strategies of staging data as an alternative to storing them like dead objects.

The lecture will discuss the Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo (1480–1544) and the causes for its manyfold comebacks in the digital era. The most remarkable of these causes is the inventive momentum of performative media installations. The visual strategies by which the historic Memory Theatres stimulated the imagination of their visitors find their echoes in computer art that could point the way for future models of visualising and staging information. They give examples of how to oppose the static model of 'storage and retrieval' with performative ways of knowledge presentation.

Notes

¹ A documentation of these and many more computer-based memory theatres can be found on http://peter-matussek.de/Pro/F_05_Synopse/Frameaufruf.html

² And if the oft-referenced anecdote found in Camillo's treatise is to be believed, his charisma was such that it could even tame wild animals. He himself relates the story thus: And to the author of this Theatre it happened that, finding himself in Paris, at the place called ‘La Tournelle’, in a room with many gentlemen at some windows looking out over a garden, a lion, who had escaped from his cage, came into that room. Drawing near to him from behind, with its paws, took him without harm by the thighs, and with its tongue, proceeded to lick him. And at that touch and at that breath, himself being overturned, and having seen that animal, all the others having fled, some here and some there, the lion humbled himself to him, almost in the act of asking forgiveness. (Camillo 1970: 39/261)

³ Marginal note in A. Neri (Keller 1991: 205).

⁴ Other accusations against him were ones of pretentiousness and charlatanism (Keller 1991: 208).