ART STATEMENT FOR "THE MEMORY PALACE SERIES"
Being born into the time of no future generation pondering
over how to visually manifest an idea of tracking events back
to that era. Remember being impelled towards a fascinating
system. A Memory Palace...
An ancient technique used for almost total recall, a
technique to remember vast amounts of information, before
the age of universal writing ability, available to everyone.
The method of loci or “ars memoriae" (art of memory in Latin)
was an implement used by the scribes of the Ancient Greek
World.
The idea has been recurrently used in literature and film.
This learning system is based on allocating physical
locations in the mind, used most often in cases where long
lists of material had to be remembered precisely. Familiar
buildings such as churches, temples or markets, places one
has physically visited are the ideal, for the task. The
Library of Alexandria was often used as and referred to as
a Memory Palace.
To use the method one have to go through (physically) a
building repeatedly and in the same sequence whilst looking
at the same places as before. Then one connect the item one
have to remember witTthe places in the building, for example
the parts in a complicated speech.To recall that speech you
visit the places in the building with your mind, with which
you have connected your speech to. The method is to ensure
that you have associated ideas with pictures, localizing
these pictures in a spatial place. A vast compound of space,
filled with memories connected with definite places in a
building. A Memory Palace.
The system is fascinating. Not only just as tool for
remembering, but also as a new concept, a product for the
imagination, and a fount to store abstract memories:
Paintings representing thoughts and memories, stored in a
labyrinthine system in a house.
In order to visualize the idea of this mental construct, and
to provide storage space for the myriad impressions stored
in the inner world of the mind and the feelings associated
with it, the intention became to construct a wooden tower
(the mind), where paintings (memories) are hung on the inner
walls (the Memory Palace).The whole construction is to be
constructed as a ramshackle house, a symbol of a scattered
brain full of information. The wooden construct will have an
entrance, where one can walk into the palace for a brief
secretive glimpse. A perverse peep, of the creative and
complex atmosphere inside the memories of someone’s mind
palace. On the walls, inside the construction, is an orga-
nized series of visual representations of memories:
Paintings overlapping each other sometimes, as if containing
uncontrollable information in underlying patterns. Every
painting is a repository of memories within memories.
The visual and spatial representations of the paintings, are
accorded their logical and/or psychological connections.
The Memory Palace Project weaves layers of psychological
narrative into separate versions, represented by each
individual painting, of an inner biography. The paintings
store their repertoire of spells in an unpleasant temple of
revelation. A brain, a storage space, in which “Dangerous”
insights sets that world apart from our own reality.
