User:Ruairiglynn/Virtual Loci
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[edit] Virtual Loci
an essay written by Wiki Member Ruairi Glynn about the method of loci, please feel free to add, edit and change.
Virtual Loci From Book-Space to Hyper-Space
Introduction
Long before the development of a succession of media technologies, tales were told and spread through ‘Oral Tradition.’ For Orators to remember these often long and complex stories they used memory strategies following an ancient technique first described by Simonides on building memory loci (places). ViArtual Architectural memory spaces in which the orator woulAd travel through an imagined 3Dimensional space to aid their memory and rendition of a tale. As a result the orator’s presentation of these stories was rich with vivid and spatial description constructing intense and memorable imagery for their audiences.
We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making a speech, drawing from the memorized places the images he has placed on them. The method ensures that the points are remembered in the right order, since the order is fixed by sequence of places in the building. (Yates 1966: 19)
The art of memory demonstrates the close relationship between architectural space and the ancient mnemonic techniques employed by orators of their time. More broadly for us all, this indicates a relationship between our innate spatial understanding of the world and how we naturally construct memory. The early advocates of the art of memory maintained therefore that if we are to maximize our potential to remember we must be able to exercise our spatial imagination. The first chapter of this essay will describe this use of the art of memory in ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and the fundamental principles established by the great orators of this time.
The validity of the art of memory as a mnemonic technique can be seen verified by its compatibility with our current understanding of how we retain knowledge and experience. Today psychologists broadly define our internal memory processing as involving the “Preservation of information through mechanisms of meaning and association’ (Crane, 1996: 20) spatial experience being a key facet of how we innately form meaning and association.
Through technological advancement the extraordinary mnemonic techniques employed by orators all but disappeared from popular use in the 17th Century. This has been largely attributed to the printed book which replaced the need for orators and transformed memory from an internal mental process to employing media devices to extend the potential to store and share information faithfully. I will argue that the printed book itself as a technology was not responsible for the demise of the techniques of the art of memory since it can clearly be employed as a valuable practice to book making but that instead mass production was the mechanism guilty of depreciating the potential of the book as a medium for vivid spatial experience. To do this I will explore the cultural significance of the use of the art of memory through history, and its relationship with the media technologies that have shaped how we store and share information.
In the chapter two I will demonstrate how the art of memory influenced the early religious art of the renaissance from paintings to architecture where it was used as a device to instill the teachings of the church deep into peoples memories. In the chapter three I will first show how these techniques progressed into early printing where it was used to create vivid and spatial experiences within the book. I will describe the affects newer printing technologies had on the creation of books in particular the trend away from elaborate and artistically sophisticated productions to standardization and fast, low cost printing.
If we accept that the art of memory and the construction of virtual memory spaces is still a valid mnemonic technique, I will ask in my final chapter how does it still relate to today’s memory devices? How do contemporary books and hyper media use spatial techniques comparable to the art of memory used by the ancient orators to engage in forming memorable experiences?
The 20th Century generated a reactionary movement of artists books which explored the experience of the book in vivid and spatial experiences. These attempted to reverse the standardization and homogenization that mass production of the book had generated. At the same time new digital technologies created a new potential for independent publishing which increasingly empowers individuals to express personal or collective views in a number of printed and digital formats.
I will then propose that digital technology has created new possibilitys for a resurgence of the art of memory. What we are seeing today is the growth of hypermedia memory devices that potentially could harness the art of memory, oral tradition and the book together fusing reproducible text with spatial composition and multimedia intensity.
Chapter 1. The Art of Memory in Oral Tradition
‘Nature herself teaches us what to do. When we see in every day life things that are pretty, ordinary and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, we are likely to remember for a long time… Let art, then, imitate nature… If we set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them… [this] will ensure our remembering them more readily.’ (Anon. 86 B.C. Trans. Caplan 1954: III xxii)
Ad Herennium gives us the most complete treatise on the art of memory and acted as a key text in influencing its resurrection in Early Renaissance Europe after been lost in the dark ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire. These instructions dictate that to create effective mnemonic techniques we must understand the natural way our minds choose to remember some things but forget others and harness that understanding to enhance our potential to retain information. Other key texts which survived were Cicero’s ‘De oratore’ and Quintillian’s ‘Institutio Oratoria’.
The essential model was a system of memorization based on visual structures as concept maps. By building a virtual Loci (places) in which you place the events of a story in a sequence, the orator can then travel through this space reciting his tale. Rather than a textual system it was based on visual intensity that the art of memory maintained was more inclined to innate natural memory structures. The invention of this art was attributed to Simonides of Ceos (circa 556 to 468 B.C.) but is likely to have formulated in preceding centuries through generations of oral tradition.
‘Simonides,’ says Plutarch. ‘called painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks; for the actions which painters depict as they are being performed, words describe after they are done.’ (Lee 1940: 197) In both forms of expression the visual image takes the central role. Poets who would have acted as orators of their own work and of others built a language of intense visualizations, these images were not just for the benefit of the audience, these dramatic depictions would have acted as visual memory aids by which orators could recite for hours.
This pictura poesis was the foundation of ‘Art of Memory’ and while giving a structure from which memory of stories could be constructed using intense visualizations, it reciprocally fed back into the art and architecture of this period. Francis Yates suggest that ‘The art of memory was a creator of imagery which… flowed out into creative works of art.’ (66: 100)
In the 4th Century AD Rome became a Christian Empire and the art of memory became a tool for spreading the word of God. The most notable orator of this time to use it was the convert Augustine of Hippo (later [1]), a former pagan teacher of rhetoric. Augustine recounts in his Confessions ‘I come to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from all sorts perceived be the senses.’ (60) It was clear that right up till the end of the Roman Empire, art of memory was a practiced skill. In 410 Alaric raided Rome and the Vandals conquered North Africa, and the classical world disappeared into the dark ages.
‘In the barbarized world [of the dark ages], the voices of the orators were silenced. People cannot meet together peacefully to listen to speeches when there is no security. Learning retreated into the monasteries and the arts of memory for rhetorical purposes became unnecessary’ (64)
Chapter 2. The Art of Memory in Medieval Art and Architecture
In the monasteries of Europe scholarly interest in the classical texts grew marking in part the end of the dark ages in Western Europe. A new fascination with classical knowledge led to widespread translating of the great Latin and Greek texts including Ad Herennium which was later to be printed for the first time in Venice in 1470 published together with Cicero’s De inventione as Rhetorica nova et vetus. The relationship of these ancient texts was that they had become adopted as devices for spreading the teachings of the church elevating memory from a skill to a virtue. The medieval transformation of the art of memory was to change a technique for orators to remember folklore and the great epic poetry, to a tool to impress on the souls of the people what they should remember.
‘What were the things which the pious Middle Ages wished chiefly to remember? Surely they were the things belonging to salvation or damnation, the articles of the faith, the roads to heaven through virtues and to hell through vices. These were the things which it sculptured in places on its churches and cathedrals, painted in its windows and frescos. And these were the thing which it wished chiefly to remember by the art of memory.’ (Yates 69: 67)
Religious imagery of this period in Europe is the richest source of art of memory artistry. Lorenzetti’s painting of Good and Bad Government (1340) in the Palazzo Communale at Siena used dramatic polarizing imagery of the characters of the piece. On one side sit Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity and Temperance while on the other side sit tyrannical vices adorned by diabolical and grotesque imagery of War, Avarice, Pride and Vainity hovering like demons. These images suggest that the artist of this time were striving to regain the forms of classical memory with great fantastical and exceptional intensity.
Good Government, Lorenzetti (1338-40)
Bad Government, Lorenzetti (1338-40)
Giotto was one such artist who appears to use the rules described as artificial memory set out by Ad Herennium to compose his extraordinarily vivid works.
Charity & Envy(1306)
Here we see very close relationship between the instructions of Ad Herennium and the use of assigning the two images exceptional beauty and singular ugliness through the disfiguration of Envy. At the same time we see another key facet of Ad Herennium’s instructions which is to build a Loci which is familiar, to place the imagery so that we can return to it and recognized it.
The influence of Ad Herennium went further than paintings. In Giotto’s time cathedrals acted as repositories of the imagery and text that later printed books would take the role of. The influence of the art of memory on the design of monuments and religious buildings was equal to that of its influence on painting since religious architecture had long been the memory container for Christianity, and the art within it the devices for specific memories. However a innovative media device was soon to become the churches new choice of memory device, the printed book.
‘The archdeacon contemplated the gigantic cathedral for a time in silence, then he sighed and stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and he looked sadly from the book to the church. ‘Alas’, this will kill that’ (Hugo 1831: 189)
This statement by Victor Hugo in the 19th Century recognized that the Cathedral had become replaced by a new container of knowledge and of new ideas. What is interesting is that he uses the word kill which creates images of cathedrals falling to the ground which of course they didn’t but their purpose did change away from being the flagship central repository to a lesser needed device especially as literate rates increase dramatically with the proliferation of printed media.
Chapter 3. Book-Space
Early book design borrowed much from the manuscripts, art and architecture influenced by the art of memory. Books were given elaborate frontispieces much like building facades adorned with columns, entablatures, pediments and other architectural features. These dramatic entrances to the book acted as vivid starting points for the journey through its contents like the first loci of a series of memory loci that constructed a virtual architectural structure within the book. These architectural features were structured throughout the book occupying the same spaces in which the text was set.
The Frontispieces from Georg Andreas Böckler’s Theatrum Machinarum Novum
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili printed for the first time by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499 is a beautiful and extraordinary example of the close relationship architecture and text had together in early printing. The text itself, that of Poliphilo and his love for Polio is in fact more of a structural device on which the author is able to investigate the “function of the metaphor of the building as a body…indeed the buildings encountered by the hero of the story are all embodiments of his beloved” (LeFaivre 1997: 2).
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili Architectural Imagery
The story takes Poliphilo through a passage of astonishingly architectural details. ‘These architectural surroundings and design artifacts in which the plot of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili unravels are described at such length that they take up more than half the book.’ (8) A lavishly vivid visual and spatial structure is built within the text and the books woodcut illustrations allowing the ‘eye to slip back and forth between textual descriptions and corresponding visual representation with the greatest of ease.’ (16)
These intricate and remarkable books were however only available to those with the money to buy such labour intensive art works. Later developments in printing would focus on speed and reducing the cost of printing to make books more accessible to the public predominantly separating image and text out. As the industrial revolution and mass production commenced, the original art books became treasured items separating themselves in value with the conventional books which were cheap and commonplace. The church now chose the book as its medium producing a fixed standardized and approved mode of representing the ‘Word of God.’ The role of orators as the central repository of knowledge for the community declined. Empowered by mass publishing of the Bible, Protestant preacher and church reformer Martin Luther advocated that every man be a priest.
‘Rhetoric itself gradually but inevitably migrated from the oral to the chirographic world… By the sixteenth century rhetoric textbooks were commonly omitting from the traditional five parts of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery) the fourth part, memory, which was not applicable to writing. They were also minimizing the last part, delivery.’ (Howell 1956: p 148)
Chapter 4. Hyper-Space
Marshall McLuhan in his text ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ identified that the printing press had led to a domination of rationalism and the standardization of the production of culture resulting in the alienation of the individual ‘the world… is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.’(1962: 136) He identifies a reactionary response by society away from printed text as the source of all knowledge toward electronic media that embraces a diversity of interaction and sharing of knowledge more akin to our person to person natural interactions through conversation rather than the predominantly linear textual experience of mass produced books.
Book making has also in the 20th Century had a reactionary response to the homogenizing of printed text too. ‘Independent art publishing was one of these alternatives, and artists books became part of the ferment of experimental forms.’ (Lyons 1993: 7) A new democratic approach to book making gave artists a role in exploring the potential of the book beyond its homogenized form.
Here a distinction has to be made between the mass produced book and the artist book since these new books built with an intricate and thoughtful process equal to that of any textual content held within them represent a return to the passion and time invested in the early printed books. These independent producers are in opposition to the overarching mass media and represent a new appreciation in personal expression and heterogeneity.
The impact of such Artist Books however has had little impact on mass media in comparison with the independent production empowered by digital media. Some artist books in the early 20th Century did however prefigure digital media’s independent, reconfigurable and interactive potential. Walter Benjamin’s Book, ‘The Arcades Project’ was an encyclopedic construction of thousands of indexed cards containing an array of interconnected and juxtaposed images and text which he called Konvolute. The reader of this book could take the whole document apart to reorganize and construct their own meaning from its parts. What is remarkable is that this construction of files that can be entered from any point, restructured and navigated to create unique journeys was started in 1927, more than half a century before hypertext and almost two decades before Vannevar Bush wrote his seminal essay ‘As We May Think’ (1945) which suggested the ideas of creating documents out of realms of disparate text stored in as he named it a ‘Memex’ Machine. (Spiller 2002: 34)
As the networking of digital information gathered pace in the 1970's with the introduction of personal computing a new language was needed to act as a metaphorical device between the human user and code so making digital memory devices accessible and easy enough to be used by the public. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) created the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) in 1981 using the metaphors of the office space to help users relate digital devices to the physical spaces in which they placed their files and folders such as libraries, briefcases, trays and filing cabinets. PARC followed a design that employed a visual and spatially object oriented framework building a virtual representation of the office they gave the public a natural understanding of how to interact with the data. This approach which is now used in all major operating software resonates with the way Ad Herennium advised Orators to build virtual spaces that we naturally recognize and place objects in them in such a way that they can later return to this space and understand how to navigate the memories stored there.
With the growth of computing power and its perceived potential to create new ways of connecting people together over global networks this metaphor was extended by William Gibson’s term cyberspace in his seminal novel, '[2]'. A spatial mental picture was built of a digital city with its virtual spaces acting in much the same way as our physical city does with shops, entertainment, forums and libraries. The heterogeneous and democratic activity of the internet and the experience of traveling from one website to another resonated with our understanding of physical space and the city.
The predominant website building language developed for the internet was HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which was a [3] version of software previously designed for page layouts in desktop publishing. Some interaction designers and software developers believed that they could bring the internet one step closer from leaving its predominantly page based layout that still reflected the book in many respects by developing VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) and began building online sites that could were interactive 3Dimensional models of architectural spaces.
VRML Space seen through early web browser Netscape
The potential of VRML promised a new type of memory architecture and created much speculation that the art of memory would become a designer tool for creating effective virtual online memory loci after some four centuries of being seen as an obsolete mnemonic model. Unfortunately VRML was given little funding and seen as a less accessible technique for the public to build their websites. The few virtual worlds that are usable online are subscription based MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). These commercially driven virtual worlds are dedicated to gaming rather than developing mnemonic devices or for the development of sharing ‘real world’ knowledge.
HTML overcame the threat of being superseded by VRML because democratically the users of the world-wide-web spoke with their (virtual) feet preferring the recognizable system of page layout, it could be argued that VRML graphically was too low in quality to provide a recognizable space which as Ad Herennium dictated is necessary for our innate cognitive understanding and therefore seemed too alien a spatial experience for its users. It could also be argued in return that our use of the internet is still dictated by use of the keyboard and therefore is most suited to hyper-textual interaction.
The most significant change in the way we search out and attain knowledge is in that we can search through endless documents in seconds, find something, click on a link to something else that is relevant and then follow a trail of fragments that we determine ourselves rather than following necessarily a fixed order determined by others. We now follow virtually infinite paths in search of our interests rather than a linear path building our own movement through data-space. Today multimedia technology provides interactive and vivid experiences on websites to support text. Images and animations have brought a new richness to the experience of navigating our way through this data-space. Within these multimedia devices just like VRML a potentially untapped approach to a digital art of memory could be established however it is clear that for the time being digital content is firmly rooted to the layout conventions of the book.
Today the most interesting development in shared knowledge is the open source and democratically growing online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It represents a new form of social co-operation where everyone is invited to contribute whether by writing or editing to any article they wish to. This essay will be hosted on Wikipedia as a contribution of a document supporting the existing documentation on the Method of Loci Article. Rather than producing a fixed book I have generated an online document as a contribution to the Wikipedia book that can be edited by any visitor at any time as well as hyper-linking it to related articles already contained within Wikipedia which can also be added to or edited at any time. This as an exercise exhibits the new potential for independent publishers to support the sharing of ideas without perpetuating the domination of rationalism and the standardization of the production that the mass produced printed book did. It highlights the freedom of expression on a global scale and the potential for people to personalize their production which can potentially reach a large audience. It also importantly echos an age before media technologies where stories, knowledge and expertise were shared laterally between people through spoken interaction in the village square except now we are living as McLuhan described it in a ‘Global Village.’ (1967: 63)
Conclusion
Instead of digital media bringing us the virtual worlds that Gibson prophesized the direction of digital networks today is more focused on embedding digital communication into our physical world through multimedia communication devices. While the potential for 3Dimensional Virtual worlds such as VRML to employ the devices of art of memory, contemporary use of the internet determined by democratic use of the technology has chosen to favour the book format as its metaphor for users to interact and navigate the data-space of the internet
The potential for group interaction creates new potential for social interaction and group editing of online books creating a new democratic form of content sharing. Currently the technology for these kinds of collaborative systems is limited to predominantly text based authorship however recent developments in multimedia technology such as mp3 Podcasting which become an instant phenomenon where by anyone can become an independent producer of audio articles that can also be mixed with image and video and then made available online and which can be automatically downloaded to peoples mp3 players or computers through subscription.
Today rather than using the book as our only metaphor for digital content we commonly use phrases that reference spatial constructs. Our experience of hypermedia as the device for navigating a global network of information is as much a virtual architectural experience as those dictated in the art of memory or in the virtual spaces of a finely crafted book.
Finally I wish to say that while it is increasingly clear that digital media has replaced the book for many as the primary device for acquiring or publishing knowledge. It is not to say that the book is obsolete. While Victor Hugo observed that the Cathedral had been metaphorically been killed by the book, it did not mean that all the Cathedrals fell to the ground. Indeed the Cathedral still holds an important role in our world today although different in many respects to its original program. The role the book will take in the future is an uncertain with the rate of change in digital services available. Its conceivable that every book will have its digital copy in the near future with internet companies such as Google now scanning millions of pre-copyright books at a rate of five thousand a day to provide content to the whole world once only available by visiting particular libraries. What is certain is that the production of artists books will not threatened by this development and the sacredness of a well crafted book will only gain value much as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has.
