Text by Fiona Shipwright
Illustrations by Janar Siniloo
We no longer need to remember anything it seems. The transference of our (biological) memories to (digital) memory has effectively liberated us from the need to train, strengthen and exercise our powers of recall. Responsibility for information we might once have “kept in mind”– a shopping list, a travel route, a phone number – is more often than not allotted to our personal digital devices. Take these away and what hope does the digital age human mind have?
Potentially more than you might think. Architecture – specifically our experience of it – plays an important role in the construction and retrieval of our biological memories. Enter here that most evocative of terms from the world of mnemonics: the Memory Palace. Reintroduced to popular imagination via the investigative antics of Sherlock Holmes and the escapist fantasies of Hannibal Lecter, the idea of a mental palace filled with memories is a mnemonic technique originally developed in Ancient Greece and Rome that allowed users to translate, organise and recall large amounts of information in a form that would “stick” – a necessity in the pre-print era.
In antiquity a distinction was made between “natural memory”: the standard, everyday mode of remembering; and “artificial memory”: that which can be trained using such methods.
Sometimes referred to as the Method of Loci (Latin for “places”), the idea is deceptively simple: in order to store – and retain – information, ideas are located in a spatial environment that can be mentally walked through. A building with differing rooms works particularly well as it presents the mind with a fixed navigation and narrative to latch onto. Ideas that need to be remembered are placed as “objects” in specific rooms, the more bizarre (read: memorable) the pairing, the better.
For example, if you need to remember to make an appointment with the vet, you might leave a cheetah sprawled across a chaise-lounge in that snug alcove in the hallway of your “palace”. Need to remember to book a table at a sushi restaurant next week? Try filling the dining room’s marble fireplace with bright pink salmon. In this way, simulacra – that is images, forms – are given a “physical” anchor in loci – places. To remember them, you just have to go for a stroll through the palatial corridors in your mind.
In human terms, our contemporary neglect in flexing our memory muscles is a relatively recent development.
In 1966, post-print but pre-digital, the English academic Frances Yates, tracing the Art of Memory in her eponymous book, already pertinently remarked that: “We moderns[…]have no memories at all […]But in the Ancient World, devoid of printing, without paper for note-taking or on which to type lectures, the trained memory was of vital importance.”
If the print revolution heralded the beginning of the end for our memory retrieval capabilities, then the post-digital world is arguably deteriorating our abilities to a state of amnesia.
Or should that be overstimulation? We are forgetting once again, but in a markedly different way. Digital media grants us the power to retain seemingly all the information we want; yet this very ability is now producing such a vast volume that it’s becoming impossible navigate. The act of accessing a great store of memory is a very different thing to actually remembering.
Perhaps this is why the language of architecture has endured to describe digital data storage – “memory architecture” – mapping drives and creating libraries. In using the same parlance are we perhaps once more trying to translate the ephemeral (once human thoughts, now digital data) into a more easily graspable form – just as the ancient method of loci attempted to do? And, if we are in effect creating digital memory palaces – complete with the concrete language of architecture – in place of our mental memory palaces, are we at the same time revealing a desire to retain the comfort of the physical qualities of built space? If this is the case, why are we not taking more care in the structure of our memory aids: why a cloud and not a palace?
Architecture discourse has long distinguished between generic space and specific place – why then our increasing inclination towards cyberspace? It’s not as though we haven’t already created spatially “formed” realms on the internet (Second Life etc.) but these are representations, or, to be more accurate, simulations of the world – any function they serve as an aid to remembering tends to be by chance rather than design.
Instead, when it comes to the things we daily use the internet for: looking up and retrieving the information stored there, we are effectively doing this in the architectural equivalent of a non-place. Just as trying to pinpoint memories placed in some vast featureless lobby will not work, neither, research suggests, will the human memory easily retain answers to questions asked into an empty search bar, which pops up instantaneously before disappearing back into the ether.
Yet this is increasingly how we learn about the world. Which begs the question, for the sake of our human memories, should we be demanding better architecture for digital memory? The continued use by modern-day “memory champions” of the method of loci seems to demonstrate that our minds, or at least the parts concerned with memory, really do work best spatially – this is how we encounter and negotiate the world. But that’s not how we’ve built the main tool we now use to pilot it.
Should our digital infrastructure – that born of the idea of a world-wide, connected web after all – be better at showing us actual connections, especially now that earlier limitations such as dial-up connections have been lifted. Do we now need architects of memory?
Key to the functioning of the Memory Palace, is the idea that nothing is ever lost, merely “misplaced”, a further parallel with the internet as the greatest human archive of all. If we now find ourselves creating digital memory palaces in order to navigate our mental memory palaces, does this take us yet further away from that which we are trying to pin down in the first place – human experience?
We have handed over our memories (and by default, increasingly our identities) for storage on the internet but somewhere along the way it seems we may have all but forgotten the art of remembering. p
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