archives of images

I'm reading a really fascinating book called "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates, which traces ancient Greek techniques of "artificial memory" through European history. In the medieval chapter, there's talk of a 14th century English friar by the name of Robert Holcot:

Holcot's Moralitates are a collection of material for the use of preachers in which the 'picture' [memory] technique is lavishly used....He places such images, in imagination, on the pages of a Scriptural text, to remind him of how he will comment on the text. On a page of the prophet Hosea he imagines the figure of Idolatry to remind him of how he will expand Hosea's mention of that sin. He even places on the text of the prophet an image of Cupid, complete with bow and arrows! The god of love and his attributes are, of course, moralised by the friar, and the 'moving' pagan image is used as a memory image for his moralising expansion of the text.

The preference of these English friars for the fables of the poets as memory images, as allowed by Albertus Magnus, suggests that the artificial memory may be a hitherto unsuspected medium through which pagan imagery survived in the Middle Ages. (pp. 98-99)

Something about pagan doodles on the pages of Hosea seems connected to our project in some odd way I haven't yet thought through, but I thought I'd post it here.

benjamin and collecting

just a quick note to say I am reading an edition of Illuminations
that has an introduction by Hannah Arendt that talks about the centrality of collecting in Benjamin's work, and also specifically of collecting quotations, fragments. You probably know all about this already, but given our own eranisteon of the Sirens, and your interest in this whole subject, I thought I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it: plus I like that it connects up to jess' interests, too! xoxox

Here is Where

reading the paper this morning I came across an article about this project, which is cool, I think...

maira kalman

It's beautiful! And Jess thinks so too. She says: are there any books that Maira K. has done in that style? There are, I think, but are there any you recommend?

time wastes too fast

nothing to do with the River Trip or Archives of Exile directly, but what a piece of work Maira Kalman did here (you remember I showed you some of her work when we met in the winter?)

wow. somehow I want you to have this, richard...

Satchmo's Archive

Perhaps you already know about this but I found some interesting stuff about Louis Armstrong's self-archiving on WFMU's 'Beware of the Blog':

[A] lesser-known fact about Armstrong is that, along with the medicinal supplements stowed in his carry-on, he toted reel-to-reel recording decks with him everywhere. With them he committed to tape concerts, conversations, his own playing and talking, audio flotsam from the Satchmo Universe. Even more impressive, Armstrong adorned the audio tape boxes with alluring and vivid Romare Bearden–esque collages layering photos, news clippings, concert programs, handwritten captions and other graphic elements. Armed with scotch tape and scissors, Armstrong spent countless hours entertaining himself, squirreled away in the den of his home in Corona, Queens, making visual music.

The collages are great - do click on the link and take a look :o)

Annea Lockwood: Sound Maps

I am totally into this mapping idea, and thank you for finding Zeemap: GREAT to have that tool available to us!

Regarding maps and rivers and sound, you definitely want to know about Annea Lockwood, who made a piece called A Sound Map of the Hudson River in the late 80's, and recently did one of the Danube. I really love her work.

The metaphor of making a sound map of the Mississippi is a good one: going down the river, I imagine collecting/creating multiple layers: actual sound documents of the river like Annea's, interviews like say the WPA writer's project, sound recordings of musicians like Alan Lomax. then there is a journal/blog/podcast (of words, music, visual images, and whatever else) of our responses to what we experience, which is ALSO in some way an archive of exile, because we ourselves are travelers in a more or less foreign land. (and if this project continues the way I'm fantasizing, there's a further layer created by the performances/collaborations that happen traveling back UP the river in this spring/summer of 2010.)

I think the idea that all these disparate kinds of information get layered onto a map is really rich. something about a map as a metaphor for the brain, how memory gets layered on the brain.

(and I think our informal tagging has already earned its keep!)

Words Against Light

I've had an email from Frances Babbage (the colleague of mine whose area is drama and who is working with Hannah Fox in the 'acts' strand of the project). She wanted to let me know about some work that the drama students are doing and that might be relevant to our thinking:

The first years (English & Drama) have been working with Terry O'Connor of Forced Entertainment as part of her Knowledge Transfer contract with us, and this Friday are presenting a performance called 'Words Against Light' in the Theatre Workshop, from 1-3. It's actually a durational performance, in that although the performers do the full two hours, spectators can drop in at any time and stay for as much or little time as they want (thankfully!).

I wanted to let you know about it because the performance is precisely a curation of voices - it is a kind of cataloguing of thoughts, feelings, experiences etc. It is improvised, but will use principles and structures that Terry has helped them to think about. There are actually two parts to this project, one of which is a live performance; the other is a film (still being edited) whose visuals consist of material filmed by the students from their mobile phones, set against a soundtrack made up (again) of each of their recorded voices, which have been edited and grouped by Terry. For the film part of the project, she got each of them into a sound booth on their own and basically encouraged them to talk for as long as they wanted (following a structure she had given them, which I won't reveal!).

I think both live performance and film are interesting (or will be, in the case of the film). I only really thought when I woke this morning how close a correspondence this work might have with the sound/composition strand of the exile project, and your own interests. So, let me know if you have any free time between 1 and 3 this Friday, and if you fancy it, do drop in!

I'll definitely go along on Friday, and, if it does seem to have connections with things that we're thinking about, I'll try to have a word with Terry O'Connor. There's information about Forced Entertainment, the company that Terry works with, here.

Hand-drawn maps and transcription

On the phone last night I was talking about the idea of asking a number of people to transcribe the same recording of speech and I suggested that it would be like asking people to draw maps of their neighbourhoods. The point really is to capture their personal, individual, subjective response to a place (in the case of maps) and to a voice (in the case of transcriptions). There's a great website run by the Hand-Drawn Map Association, which offers a wide range of scanned images and gives a flavour of how amazing people's personal maps can be...