Workshop: "The Renaissance of the Theatre of Memory”

11th and 12th of April 2003, Clubhouse Freie Universität Berlin
SFB 447 Project B 7: "Computer as Theatre of Memory”


What are memory theatres?
Why did they turn up just between 1520 and 1620?
Why did they vanish again after that time-period?
And why do they return in the age of electronic media?
How does the memory theatre relate to our concepts of human memory?
In which respect are memory theatres exemplary for current techniques of knowledge presentation?


Section 1: "Contemporary Artistic Approaches to the Theatre of Memory”


Kirsten Wagner: The memory theatre in the fine arts and its correspondences to the computer
The renaissance of the memory theatre is a cultural phenomenon that is not limited to the fine arts, but has achieved its own aesthetical expression there. It were also the fine arts which seismographically signalized the current interest in the ancient art of memory and the Renaissance and Baroque memory theatre. The first computer applications and media installations which took up the historical memory theatre as model have already appeared in the early 1980s. Until today these artworks have been followed by numerous other artistic projects which simultaneously herald a performative turn in the theories and practices of memory.
The actual circumstances, why the historical memory theatre could become so virulent in context of new media and computer technology, are multi-faceted. A comparison of the different artistic projects has unearthed the following four aspects of computer technology that seem to correspond to the memory theatre in a very peculiar way. (1) The storage aspect: It relates to the computer as a storage device which was imagined to be universal. (2) The multi-media aspect: This aspect refers to the processing and storing of images, texts and sounds the computer systems are capable of. (3) The spatial aspect: Its focus are not only the virtual spaces that have occupied the computer screens, but also the use of space as an organization principle which determines computer-based data management since the 1970s. (4) The combinational aspect: This last aspect touches the Hypertext-principle which is also characteristic for computer-based data management. As I will illustrate with my short introduction into the first section, all aspects allow references to the memory theatre and actually have been brought in connection with it.


Robert Edgar: Memory Theatre One
In the mid 1970's a high-school friend of mine from Cocoa Beach, Robert Polidori, was then working at Anthology Film Archives in NYC, and among other things helping Harry Smith edit his film Mahagonny. Robert sent me the Frances Yates` book "The Art of Memory" which blew my mind. The content seemed never explicitly mentioned outside of the book, yet was imbedded in so much of the art work of the time. After reading the book, I saw it on the cover of Richard Foreman's book of plays for his Ontological-Hysterical Theater; in the filmic slide show of Michael Snow's A Casing Shelved, and in the binary architecture of Duchamp's Large Glass and corresponding Green Box. In many ways it seemed imbedded in the architecture of the film projector itself, and in the qualitative, not quantitative wheels-within-wheels calendar of the Balinese.
In 1978 I moved to Silicon Valley and was introduced to personal computers through a bluegrass group I was playing with that included the inventor of both visual adventure games and construction set software: Warren Robinett. It took me a while, but I taught myself enough programming to produce Memory Theatre One (1985), which was one of the first interactive art works for personal computer, and certainly the first memory theater explicitly programmed on a computer.
During my presentation I will show a video demonstrating MT One, and describe its structure, functionality, and content. I will also speak to the aesthetics engaged by taking on the construction of such a memory theatre.


Emil Hrvatin: Forgetness of the Theatre vs. Theatre of Memory: Five Inputs for Giulio Camillo
The history of theatre has overlooked Camillo completely, although the name of the Theatre of Memory itself is paradoxical enough to arouse at least a theoretical interest.
None of the arts depends so much on memory as theatre does. Memory is what constitutes theatre. Memory is the u-topian site of the theatre, the place that is not there, and without which the theatre simply does not exist.
The remnants of a performance are the sings of its disintegration. The performance falls apart into pieces of memory dispersed among its protagonists and the witnesses of its occurrence. This happens already during the performance itself, as Kurosawa's Rashomon shows on another level, and as Richard Schechner, who dedicated most of his theatrical projects to the depassivisation of the spectator, confirms with his hypothesis about the "selective inattention" of the spectators.
Camillo reformed theatre in a sense that he understood theatre as direct communication between medium and spectator. In Camillo's Theatre of Memory the spectator is at the same time co-author and performer. The spectator is an improvizor on a given theme.
This simultaneous creative and performing body is conceptualized by Paul Virilio as terminal body – "interactive being which is both sender and receiver”, a being living in nonmaterial space, constituted and controlled by high media technology. In real-theatrical sense that means facing of the absent place of the Author. The place of a centered Master's gaze, the place of an omnipotent Creator is an empty place. Being empty it enables the structuration of corporeal looking.


Arnold Dreyblatt: The Spaces of Memory
How do we visualize the accelerating sum of artificial memory traces in our contemporary lives? The storage mechanisms of the past are becoming mechanized and seem to store and "write" themselves. What processes of filtering and selection determine which texts and artifacts will remain and which will be lost to us? How do we represent the layers of "data writing" with which our lives are being encoded? My recent artistic work seeks to realize a metaphorical great archive, in which a spatial
data architecture is simulated through means of transparency and landscapes of endless databases. The project involves collection of historical and contextual database material, and researches new
possibilities for data projection, display and human interaction. A series of rooms are created reflecting themes of individual and collective memory, along with discussions of the technologies and
structures with which we categorize and access the mountains of text material. We localize and project memory fragments in association with an implied and given room and place.


Section 2: "The Theatre of Memory in the Context of Cultural History”


Horst Wenzel: The ´theatre of imagination` and its tradition
In my presentation I shall try to show that the Christian tradition of the 'theater of imagination' - since Tertullian being juxtaposed to profane theater games - has been continuing in the vernacular
literature of the Middle Ages as well, in particular in the illuminated manuscripts of Thomasin von Zerclaere's "Der Welsche Gast" (1212). Giving examples I want to demonstrate how this theater of imagination works as well as that its addressees are twofold: illitterati and literati, which means that it belongs to both manuscript and memorial culture.

Robert Felfe: Curiosity cabinet and the art of memory: Relationship and differences
It is common knowledge in historical research that there is a direct connection between the Kunst- und Wunderkammer and early modern art of memory. This relationship is particularly obvious in those instances where ars memoriae creates orders that can be visually perceived; as for example in the theatre of memory which was invented by Giulio Camillo. Thus the museum and memory can both be understood as spatial forms of knowledge. Therein two techniques have a pivotal position in artificial memory and are probably reflected in curiosity cabinets: On the one hand individual exhibits in museum collections were placed in especially furnished positions, which seem to be analogous to the system of the loci and imagines agentes of ars memoriae. Thus evolved a spatial order of things owing to which the collection could be understood as a microcosmic compendium of the entire world.
On the other hand the ars combinatoria is often pointed out as a method. As it was adapted by the art of memory for constructing variable connections between different elements it was also seen to be the theoretical basis for viewing by associative connections in the space of museum collections and therefore as a procedure that generated meaning.
The above-mentioned aspects are as insightful as they are problematic. Focusing on the curiosity cabinets the talk will show the influence of the ars memoriae as well as those instances where collections transcended the horizon of the art of memory.


Section 3: "The Return of the Theatre of Memory in the Age of New Media”


Annette Hünnekens: Virtual Memory Theatres as Expanded Museum
The museum as an institution, which organizes the collective memory, can be seen as a memory theatre. Particularly, due to the increase in performative presentation technologies that was built up in the eighties. With the arrival of the new electronic media, a modification of the museum as an institution is at hand. It corresponds to the memory theatre not only in a fictional or mimetic manner, but in a simulative way as well.
Especially the virtual qualities of the electronic media allows the boundaries get porous. They make the museums ground permeable and provide new ways of collecting, storing, preparing and presenting of exponats as "information" possibilities, due to their affinity to the processes of thinking and reminding.
Consequently, so called "virtual museums" emerge, which fall back on traditional structures of cultural history - in regards to the organization of knowledge - and the mixture of the old and new together in a curious way. While the civil museum of the 18th century itself seems to be museal in these "cultural hybrids", the antique precursors of thinking and reminding become alive in a peculiar structural way in the virtual world. In the virtual memory theatre - as metaphor and metaform of the reminding processes - forms and contents of the past, present and future summarize in an a-topic way and build up a kind of "quarry of the cultural history."


Wolfgang Coy: Current trends in data management and information presentation
Talk on Memory, Storage and Computers


Heiko Idensen: Hyper-Text as Anti-Theatre (from mimesis to emergence)
The spatial metaphors had their big renaissance in the 1990s, when the "desktop” became the most common interface metaphor and developers, media theorists and users were searching for other operational and structural models than those of the book or the film. In this context arose the "stage-metaphor.” With the "stage-metaphor”--within the memory theatre-concept--it was also possible to find an active role for the user who now was determined as an actor.
A historical flashback: In 1945 Vannevar Bush introduced his prophetic concept of the Memex (MEMory EXtender) and with it transformed the memory theatre into the desktop of a scientist. The Memex was meant to be an easily accessible, individually configurable storehouse of knowledge including devices and techniques such as the Cyclops Camera, a photographic device worn on the forehead, dry photography, microfilm, the Vocoder and, most importantly, a linking-system, which made the Memex a prototype for the latest memory-theatre: HYPERTEXT.
In 1965 Ted Nelson then coined the terms "hypertext” and "hypermedia” which refer to non-sequential writing and branching presentations of all types. He already imagined the computer to be a "literary machine” being capable of linking together and storing all human writing. Actually, he found in this associative organization of computer data bases a model of his own creative and distractible consciousness which he described as a "hummingbird mind.”
Why Hypertext cannot only be regarded as the latest memory theatre, but also as an "Anti-Theatre” will be discussed within my presentation.
http://www.hyperdis.de/



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