January 04, 2005

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. 

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