‘ The library
seeks its meaning within’
(Zeller)
The ‘Art of Memory’ by Francis Yates (1966) is a history of mnemonic devices, systems of ‘artificial memory’, aides to ‘retain vast stores of knowledge without the help of the printed page’.
Yates writes ‘the first step was the imprint on the memory a series of loci or places. The commonest, though not the only, type of mnemonic place system used was the architectural type.’
I’ll mention two examples from the book below that directly link an architectural space to memory.
The first is Guilio Camillo’s memory theatre at the beginning of the Renaissance, The second is Robert Fludd’s memory theatre at the end. They both use the internal layout of a Theatre as a virtual repository to store, or remember, knowledge.
Yates unlocks at least two systems within the mnemonic devices – on one level one can relate ideas that one wishes to remember to a specific feature in the Theatre, thus relating place to the memory. On another level the overall geometry of the theatre references ideas of the Renaissance man’s perception of self and universe.
In Camillo’s memory theatre, the interior of the memory theatre also acted as a repository in which Camillo had ambitions ‘to store up eternally the eternal nature of all things which can be expressed in speech’ and assigning to them ‘eternal places’.
One could assign ideas to specific locations within the theatre, so that the idea can be easily remembered. ‘This high and incomparable placing not only performs the office of conserving for us the things, words, and arts which we confide to it, so that we may find them at once whenever we need them, but also gives us true wisdom from whose founts we come to the knowledge of things from their causes and not from their effects’.
The overall geometry of the theatre references Vitruvius’s description of a Roman amphitheatre, through similar encoding of geometrical shapes and layout of the stage, seating, and gates in plan.
In the second example, Fludd uses architectural elements of the stage as places to store knowledge. The five entrances to the stage are the most prominent, ‘…five doors to be used as five memory places is the leading motif of the whole system’. Following the doors, positions on the stage, columns on the stage, colours, and materials of the stage set, can be used to encode information one wishes to remember, just as one may store information in a repository.
Yates finds encoded in Fludd’s text and etchings ‘as a secret hidden within it, factual information about the Globe theatre.’ (Yates). If so, these would be the only existing drawings of Shakespeare’s original Globe. Fludd uses a real architectural building to hang the structure of his memory theatre.
The theatre’s overall geometry also attempts to link the ‘round arts’ (the macrocosm, cosmos and ephemeral forms) to the ‘square arts’ (the microcosm, man and the corporeal). Fludd exerts ‘terrific effort towards a detailed attempt to use the principles of the art of memory in association with the heavens to form a total world-reflecting system’ (Yates).
The library is a place of communal memory. It is a repository of information that contains our attempts to describe the universe and the self. The Dewey Decimal catalogues all subjects known and leaves room for the unknown.
As the memory theatres use architecture as mnemonic devices, it is not much more of a leap to perceive the library capable of not only storing memory in its repositories and electronic archives, but also encoding information about the universe at the scale of the building. A hermetic seal placed on the architectural vessel.
Jorge Borges reminds us of another Renaissance memory system, that of Raymond Lull. Borges relates it to the contemporary ‘machine-for-thinking’, the computer.
‘… a man of genius, Raymond Lulio (Llull)… conceived a sort of machine-for-thinking made up of concentric circles in wood covered with symbols of the divine predicates. This mechanism, set in motion by the systematic investigator, would yield an indefinite and almost infinite number of concepts of a theological order. He did the same as regards the faculties of the soul and the qualities of everything in the world. As was to be expected, all these combinatory mechanisms served no purpose whatsoever.
… the experimental science prophesied by Francis Bacon has now given us cybernetics, which has allowed man to set foot on the moon and whose computers are - if the phrase is acceptable - belated sisters of Llull’s ambitious circles.’ (Borges, 1984,)
A Machine-for-thinking is also a memory device, a machine-for-remembering. Computing and ‘Unconventional Computing’ is the contemporary art of memory.
Another leap: the library is a form of ‘unconventional computing’ or computing using materials (a term from the recent Spiller/Armstrong/Hanczyc conference, 2010). Ice is the protocell tool, which can be seen as the hardware, the software is the process (phase change) that embeds the information into the ice archive.
As the Library’s repository expands or contracts over time due to changes of the collection, of formatting and storage, the memory devices are also set in motion. The building is living, it grows with the collection, the architectural mnemonic device changes over time with its contained memory.
Kurt Schwitters Merzbau is an example of a growing living archive.
‘…up until 1923, Kurt Schwitters’ studio only served as an artistically inspired storage space for Dadaist works of art… found objects…and other collage materials. It was only after 1923 that Schwitters gradually began to transform his studio into an architectonic, sculptural structure, his Merzbau… as the Merzbau grew, the original architecture disappeared’. (Meyer-Buser, p274)
The creation and the collection of art starts to transform the studio space. The spatial environment became forged, not only part of the artwork but part of an all-encompassing life-work.
'The installation forced the visitor, both mentally and physically, to enter into the work and to succumb with all their senses to the rules of the game that were in operation there. Thus the Merzbau demonstrates a radical change in the modern understanding of art. The recipient had to relinquish his/her safe distance if he/she wanted to meet the challenge of modern works...' (Meyer-Buser)
There are parallels to Guilio Camillo’s memory theatre, the obsessive nature of collecting and the immersion into an interior space that has its own rules of operation, that engages with the senses of the visitor. Viglius describes entering a ‘mock-up’ of Camillo’s memory theatre:
‘All things…after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre’. (Yates, pg 132)
Atlas, Jorge Luis Borges (1984) Editorial Sudamericana quote from Ars Magna, pg 72
Meyer-Buser, Susanne 'On Disappearing in Space, Walk in Collages from Schwitters to the Present Day’.
Essay from: In the Beginning Was MERZ - From Kurt Schwitters to the Present Day, (2000) Edited by Susanne Meyer-Buser and Karin Orchard, Hatje Cantz Publishers
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