αθηναϊκός ιστός

"Παρά τις επανειλημμένες καταστροφές και τις ανοικοδομήσεις, ο πολεοδομικός ιστός της Αθήνας δεν μεταβλήθηκε ουσιαστικά. Οι αστικοί δρόμοι σε όλη τη διάρκεια της μεσαιωνικής περιόδου ακολουθούν τον αρχαίο σχεδιασμό του οδικού δικτύου της πόλης και συμπίπτουν με τους αρχαίους δρόμους. Το ίδιο φαινόμενο παρατηρείται και στη νεότερη περίοδο αλλά και στη σημερινή ακόμη εποχή στο παλιό τμήμα της πόλης και στη διάταξη ορισμένων από τις βασικές οδικές αρτηρίες της Αθήνας. Έξω από τα τείχη της πόλης, το αρχαίο δίκτυο των δρόμων που οδηγούσε στα περίχωρα της Αθήνας παραμένει αμετάβλητο. Άλλωστε, με μικρές αποκλίσεις, επιβιώνει μέχρι σήμερα."

 αρχαιολογία της πόλης των Αθηνών

visual translations

Chiasmus

Art of Memory

Medieval Christian theology ascertained that there are four Virtues: Fortitude, Justice, Temperance and Prudence. It is Prudence which is important as this was considered to be the place of memoria or memory. Within prudence, medieval scholars included memoria, intelligentia and providentia. Two works were of special significance as they drew excessively on these ideas - Albertus Magnus's De bono (IV, 2) and commentary on the De memoria et reminiscentia, and Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (H, ii, 49). Rossi[xii] notes that the discussions of memory in Albertus's De bono and the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas are explicitly derived from Aristotelian and pseudo-Ciceronian sources (pseudo in the sense that the Ad Herennium was considered to be by Cicero). Rossi quotes Albertus – “It is natural memory which helps us easily to remember things we have known or done in the past. Artificial memory is that memory which is constructed by means of the arrangement of places and images.' As in all the other arts, perfection in the art of memory is attained naturally, and since in our actions 'we are directed from the past towards the present and the future, and not vice versa', memory is presented, along with intelligence (intelligentia) and providence (providentia) as one of the three components of the virtue of Prudence.

the-quest-for-universal-language 

To speculate-On "Cognition"

The human capacity for effective and efficient action is affected by many factors. Discussing consistancy in color perception, Maturana and Varela argue that in the perception of color we cannot find a direct correspondence between the color consistency of the objects we see and the light waves reflected from them. They claim that it is not easy to explain how we see colors, but that we must stop thinking that the color of the objects we see is determined by the features of the light we receive from them. Rather, they suggest that the experience of a color corresponds to a specific pattern of states of activity in the nervous system that can be triggered by a number of different light perturbations (1992, 22. Also see 252, 253, 254).

Following this model, I would suggest that the cognitive function of people is not "distorted" by circumstances; rather, that human cognitive performance is context-dependent and multidimensional, and that to really understand human cognition it is not possible to approach it as a self-contained system. Human cognition should be approached as an integrated structure, where cognitive processes vary from situation to situation, depending on situational differences that relate to a broad variety of categories which overflow traditional definitions of cognition. These factors affect cognitive performance not necessarily in negative ways; experience permits people to develop efficient strategies to deal with new situations, responding to them by taking shortcuts and leaps of faith, in high-speed information-processing acts commonly called intuitive jumps. These "intuitive jumps" are connected with the goal-seeking character of our interaction with the environment and bring to the fore the role that guessing plays in cognitive performance.

Hidden underneath the litcrit discussions lie more subtle and difficult questions of intelligibility. As competent readers, we handle linear texts by taking notes, reordering and analyzing writings for our own needs. In reading current hypertext: web pages or interactive computer games and applications, our tasks also include figuring out what it is that we might take notes on, or reorder and for what purposes we might use it. These problems are often referred to in terms of navigation and orientation (what is it? how can I get around it?). We are literate readers: accustomed to genres which encode the reader, author and purpose of the communication into their forms; we are accustomed to the outline as our model of intelligible structure in printed texts. That sense of outline enables us to linearly traverse complex structures (we go from I.b.2. directly to II.A.1). To that model, hypertext adds the topical link-node diagram which is offered as an intelligible data structure. Current media add the situated speech of conversation, image, sequence, motion and structures of interaction. These are different and new: there are few genres that provide us with the expectations we need to navigate and orient ourselves.. The Art of Memory, a mnemonic tradition that began in ancient Greece and persisted through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century gives us an account of how people could hold and organize thoughts, making of themselves walking books without using the written word. It may also point toward ways for developing visual and narrative models of intelligibility to apply to new media. The Art of Memory provides us with way to open up questions of intelligibility through structure, visible form, metaphor, and narrative.
Hypertext is as much a term for understanding as it is an objective phenomenon. It is perhaps the best ready-made method for considering the problems of interactive media. The history of hypertext has been shaped by theories and attitudes that are already realized in the work produced. Many characteristics of hypertext are socially constructed; the common understandings make communications intelligible. It is important to work toward constructing those common understandings. When we consider "common understandings," we know that they may not be universally held and are often distinctly not those of leading thinkers. Common understandings are often not explicitly documented; they are vague, inferred and debatable. For example, this article asserts that computer information is commonly understood to be disembodied, scientific and objective. To the contrary, Richard Coyne, in Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age asserts that "the operative philosophy of the computer world is not logical positivism, or even analytical philosophy, but liberal pragmatism.Neither is the computer world inhuman, driven by a kind of 'techno-rationalism.The computer world may no longer be considered scientific and authoritarian by its developers, but it once was and it has been popularly thought of that way until very recently. These issues open up a number of questions. Whose beliefs shape media like hypertext? Are outmoded opinions still important? Does the malleability of beliefs make artifacts like hypermedia malleable, or will hypermedia remain fixed in some respects by the body of products produced? While it is quite beyond this paper to discuss these possibilities, they are relevant questions. Will change be revolutionary, continuous or will the forms remain fixed? We have some historical precedents: cars, bicycles and radio electronics all show the tendency to change in ways that resemble plate tectonics, i.e., to coalesce from a period of fluidity into a fixed form which remains until stresses force a change, which results in another period of general or special quake and confusion, coalescing into another period of fixity. The modern bicycle took shape near 1880, and has changed little since. Broadcast has three major periods: am, fm and television. Cable and digital appear to be the fourth and fifth. We are certainly in a quake zone within communication, and the ability to form the next stage will be a matter of social power, and a matter of establishing a set of concepts adequate to analyze current pressures.
Within this context, it is not possible to be definitive about the proper interpretation of hypertext and its nature, but, again in the words of Richard Coyne, to "open up a space" in which questions and possibilities can be organized and discussed.

Guessing as a cognitive strategy.Guessing is a very efficient way to strategize an action on the basis of existing information; guessing is connected to meaning in information already possessed. Bateson suggests that meaning may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information and restraint. He suggests that any aggregate of events or objects contains redundancy or pattern. If we divide the aggregate into two parts, the observer that sees only one part "can guess, with better than random success" what is in the other part. Bateson suggests that what is in one part contains information, or has meaning, or redundancy about what is in the other part. In cybernetic terms "the information available on one side will restrain (i.e., reduce the probability of) wrong guessing" (Bateson, 1985, 131). Guessing is then based on information possessed, on redundancy and on the resulting predictability, and it is as much a proof of human economy of action in the realm of cognitive strategies as the reading of instructions.
 

 Cognition, Emotion and Other Inescapable Dimensions of Human Experience

 

http://trex.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/Feature_Articles/ArtofMemory/ArtofMemoryPt2.html

internet as a potentially epic narrative

It has seldom been realized that the listener's naive relation-
ship to the storyteller is controlled by his interest in retaining
what he is told. The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is
to assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story.
Memory is the epic faculty par excellence. Only by virtue of a
comprehensive memory can epic writing absorb the course of
events on the one hand and, with the passing of these, make its
peace with the power of death on the other.[...]
Mnemosyne, the rememberer, was the Muse of the epic art
among the Greeks. This name takes the observer back to a part-
ing of the ways in world history. For if the record kept by mem-
ory-historiography-constitutes the creative matrix of the var-
ious epic forms (as great prose is the creative matrix of the
various metrical forms), its oldest form, the epic, by virtue of
being a kind of common denominator includes the story and the
novel. When in the course of centuries the novel began to emerge
from the womb of the epic, it turned out that in the novel the
element of the epic mind that is derived from the Muse-that is,
memory-manifests itself in a fonn quite different from the way
it manifests itself in the story.
Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a hap-
pening on from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived
element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its
varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by
the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form
in the end. One ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, par-
ticuhtrly the Oriental ones, have always readily shown. In each
of them there is a Scheherazade who thinks of a fresh story when-
ever her tale comes to a stop. This is epic remembrance and the
Muse-inspired element of the narrative. But this should be set
against another principle, also a Muse-derived element in a nar-
rower sense, which as an element of the novel in its earliest
form-that is, in the epic-lies concealed, still undifferentiated
from the similatly derived element of the story. It can, at any
rate, occasionally be divined in the epics, particularly at moments
of solemnity in the Homeric epics, as in the invocations to the
Muse at their beginning. What announces itself in these passages
is the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist as contrasted
with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is
dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle; the second, to
many diffuse occurrences. It is, in other words, remembrance
which, as the Muse-derived element of the novel, is added to
reminiscence, the corresponding element of the story, the unity
of their origin in memory having disappeared with the decline
of the epic.[...]
Regarding this aspect of the matter we owe the
most important elucidation to Georg Lukacs, who sees in the
novel "the form of transcendental homelessness." According to
Lukacs, the novel is at the same time the only art form which
includes time among its constitutive principles.[..]

The "meaning of life" is really the center about which the
novel moves. But the quest for it is no more than the initial ex-
pression of perplexity with which its reader sees himself living
this written life. Here "meaning of life" -there "moral of the
story": with these slogans novel and story confront each other.
and from them the totally different historical co-ordinates of
these art forms may be discerned. If Don Quixote is the earliest
perfect specimen of the novel, its latest exemplar is perhaps the
Education sentimentale.
[...] That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand
which emerges in Valery's words is that of the artisan which we
encounter wherever the art of storytelling is at home. In fact,
one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the
storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's
relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw
material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid,
useful, and unique way. It is a kind of procedure which may
perhaps most adequately be by the. proverb if one
thinks of it as an ideogram of a story. A proverb, one might say,
is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which
a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.
Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teach-
ers and sages. He has counsel-not for a few situations, as the
proverb does, but for many, like the sage. For it is granted to
him to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that
comprises not only his own experience but no little of the ex-
perience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is
added to his own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his
distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he
is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed com-
pletely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the
incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff,
in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the
righteous man encounters himself.

[W.Benjamin ,The Storyteller, Illuminations]

περί μνήμης

Novel as a finite set

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Memory is the epic faculty par excellence.

W.B.

ever-deeper layers

"Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater.Its the medium of past experience (Medium des Erlebten), just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a  man digging".

Excavation and Memory_W.Benjamin

Wide-eyed presentation of actualities

Benjamin probably was the most peculiar Marxist ever pro-
duced by this movement, which God knows has had its full share
of oddities. The theoretical aspect that was bound to fascinate
him was the doctrine of the superstructure, which was only
briefly sketched by Marx but then assumed a disproportionate
role in the movement as it was joined by a disproportionately
large number of intellectuals, hence by people who were inter-
ested only in the superstructure. Benjamin used this doctrine
only as a heuristic-methodological stimulus and was hardly in-
terested in its historical or philosophical background. What fas-
cinated him about the matter was that the spirit and its material
manifestation were so intimately connected that it seemed per-
missible to discover everywhere Baudelaire's correspondances,
which clarified and illuminated one another if they were prop-
erly correlated, so that finally they would no longer require any
interpretative or explanatory commentary. He was concerned
with the correlation between a street scene, a speculation on the
stock exchange, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line which
holds them together and enables the historian or philologist to
recognize that they must a11 be placed in the same period.

διάστημα και μνημονοτεχνική/τοπολογία και τέχνη

 In The Art of Memory, Frances Yates elucidates a classical example of the perceptual affects of time and space through media.  The medium of memory utilizes both time and space.  "Artificial memory," a mnemonic technology, was used to remember a speech as it unfolded in time through the media of architecture. [see memory, (2)] The speech was mapped onto specific familiar places or "loci" through which the orator navigated in his or her mind.  In "artificial memory," the temporal and the spatial were inextricable. 
According to Einstein, space and time are relative to the observer.  They are continuous only within the coordinate system in which they are operating.  Therefore, multiple types of "space-time" are conceptually possible outside of the "space-time" experience of human beings (Nerlich 1-11).  In 1907, German mathematician Minkowski published Space and Time , a text that posited a four-dimensional space, with time as the fourth dimension.  Minkowski was a crucial influence on Einstein's revision of the theory of relativity and the further definition of his own concept of "space-time" as a single entity rather than two separate entities (Nerlich 1-11).  Einstein's and Minkowski's conceptions of space radically transformed the media of visual arts and literature.  As Linda Dalrymple Henderson notes in The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, modernist movements in the visual arts became concerned with the representation of four-dimensional spatial realities as determined by time.  From Cubism, which still maintained a figurative approach, to the abstractions of Russian suprematism and De Stijl, modern art attempted to depict and form changing spatial and temporal realities.  Likewise, as Joseph Frank proposes in The Idea of Spatial Form , modernist writers intend their work to be read as a distinct moment in time as opposed to a chain of events.  Lessing's categories had switched sides to the pictorial representation of time and the literary representation of space.

timespace

De inventione

Invention is the excogitation of true things (res), or things similar to truth to render one's cause plausible; disposition is the arrangement in order of the things thus discovered; elocution is the accomodation of suitable words to the invented (things); memory is the firm perception in the soul of things and words; pronunciation is the moderating of the voice and body to suit the dignity of the things and words. [De inventione, I, vii, 9]Cicero

The Flaneur

Who is that man moving slowly in the lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face ? He is a rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.

The Art of Memory/ Ad Herennium

The artificial memory is established from places and images (Constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginibus), the definition to be forever repeated down the ages. A locus is a place easily grasped by the memory, such as a house, an intercolumnar space, a corner, an arch, or the like. Images are forms, marks or simulacra (formae, notae, simulacra) of what we wish to remember. For instance if we wish to recall the genus of a horse, of a lion, of an eagle, we must place their images on definite loci.

The art of memory is like an inner writing. Those who know the letters of the alphabet can write down what is dictated to them and read out what they have written. Likewise those who have learned mnemonics can set in places what they have heard and deliver it from memory. 'For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading.'







http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/yates-adherenn.htm

Notae

"It is one thing to worship a picture, it is another by means of pictures to learn thoroughly the story that should be venerated. For what writing makes present to those reading, the same picturing makes present to the uneducated, to those perceiving visually, because in it the ignorant see what they ought to follow, in it they read who do not know letters. Wherefore, and especially for the common people, picturing is the equivalent of reading."

phantasmagoria

"Since each phantasm is a combination not only of the neutral form of the perception, but of our response to it (intentio) concerning whether it is helpful or hurtful, the phantasm by its very nature evokes emotion. This is how the phantasm and the memory which stores it helps to cause or bring into being moral excellence and ethical judgement."

The Mnemotechnics of Morality

This precisely is the long story of how responsibility originated.The task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises evidently embraces and presupposes as a preparatory task that one first makes men to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular and consequently calculable...One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this premival problem were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics."If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory"-this is the main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth.
           
Friedrich Nietzsche


when I think of U, my mind hurts

convolutions_or how to read Arcades Project

"One must have a rigid, easily retained order, with a definite beginning. Into this order one places the components of what one wishes to memorize and recall. As a money-changer ("nummularium") separates and classifies his coins by type in his money bag ("sacculum," "marsupium"), so the contents of wisdom's storehouse ("thesaurus," "archa"), which is the memory, must be classified according to a definite, orderly scheme."

O'Keefe and Nadel refer to "'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The art of memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject literally 'walks' through these loci and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any distinguishing feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968, Crovitz 1969, 1971, Briggs, Hawkins and Crovitz 1970, Lea 1975), as is the minimal interference seen with its use."

decoding Arcades Project

Mnemonic criticism as I have been outlining it has still other closely related applications. By investigating the popular emblems of death and accompanying doggerel, designed to remind the viewer of his or her ultimate end, we can rescue from obscurity some of the commonplace images and moral saws known to Catholics and Protestants alike. After all, with its explicit commemorative injunction to reflect on the motto “Memento Mori” [Remember your Death], the death's head is a focal emblem of the Renaissance. Treating the Book of Christian Prayers, better known as Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book, in terms of mnemonic criticism enables us to elucidate the relation of the visual and textual properties of this popular work in ways never before attempted. Such an approach permits us to address the rationale behind the series of moral messages along the margins of this book which are conveyed by hieroglyphic memorials of man's transience and of God's grand design. Looking at the home prayer book in this way, at its messages and its method for conveying them, will make accessible to contemporary readers the ways the ars memorativa was expressed through and, in some cases, gave shape to contemplative texts.

Mnemonic Criticism & Renaissance Literature: A Manifesto

index_ content

 But soft, my Genius; ere thou leade thy Reader into the Maze or Labyrinth of the beauties therin contained, pause heer a while, to consider how to behaue thy self . . . . First then shalt thou presente him with the Symbol it self, set-forth in manner of a Deuise, with an Imprese and Motto, expressing the allusion to the SACRED PARTHENES herself, in some mysterie of hers, [page 19] or attribute belonging to her . . . . Then looking back with a fresh reuiew on the Symbol itself, by way of an Essay, shalt thou make a fuller Suruey therof, dis­coursing on the Paragon herself, to match, compare, and paralel them togeather, to find out some Elogies or other, in prayse of our SACRED PARTHENES . . . . And after al, shalt thou inuite him to Apostrophize with the Paragon PARTHENES herself, vnder the Symbol so handled, being the vtmost scope, and ful fruition of the whole; and so conclude the peece with some boone or suite, correspondent to the present occasion, in euerie one. And this method would I haue thee keepe in al. (sig. A7v-A8v)
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/nec/engel11.htm

Mnemonica by Willis, John

Book description: London : printed and are to be sold by Leonard Sowersby, at the Turn-stile, near New-market, in Lincolns-Inn fields, 1661.. Octavo, . First edition of the Sowersby translation. A-M8 One full page woodcut of a (memory) theater . This copy is bound in full contemporary, sheep with blind ruled borders and spine. It exhibits light browning but is, otherwise, clean and free of defect. . Mnemonica is interesting chiefly because of its use of the Elizabethan theater as a memory locus. Dividing a theater in half, lengthwise, Willis produces what he terms a memory repository having two rooms, designed for very simple mnemotechnic, such as shopping lists or prices. The importance of Willis' work lies in its probable influence on Robert Fludd (1574-1637). In the second part of his Utriusque Cosmoi Maioris scilicet et Minoris, Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia (Oppenheim, 1619), Fludd develops this use of the theater as a memory locus along Hermetic-cabalist lines. Frances Yates points out that Fludd uses as his model locus the famous Globe Theater in London. Willis may also be the inspiration behid Fludd's theaters of Night and Day in the zodiac, parts of an occult memory system. Mnemonica was translated into English by Leonard Sowersby in 1661.