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.

bicycle of necessity

I like that you're thinking of the strange 14th-street device as BOTH a bicycle AND as the wheel of necessity! The fact that the wheel of destiny is made out of a dismantled bicycle alludes to the importance of real physical movement in our project and connects the two places where we meet the sirens: in the abstract space of Plato's cosmology as well as in the topography of Odysseus' mythical journey.

(Bleugh - what I've just written reads like one of the terrible little texts you see on the walls in galleries of contemporary art - I think the sentiment is right though, so I'll leave it up!)

Odysseus on his bicycle...

Music for Bicycles

I am perhaps slightly re-inventing the wheel (groan) by considering music for bicycle wheels: a quick internet search uncovered "Eine Brise", by Mauricio Kagel, and "Travelon Gamelon" by Richard Lerman. Here's a review of a performance of the Kagel last year in Los Angeles. Both of these pieces involved multiple bicyclists actually riding the streets, a lovely idea, no?! This stationary bicycle wheel roulette/altar is quite different, of course, more about the connection of wheels and spindles, necessary and otherwise....

Gopnik on Information

I thought this was interesting regarding our eranisteon, it's from an article about how the internet is changing us (yawn), but it's by Adam Gopnik, so it's better than average on the subject.

In her book “Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” [the Harvard historian Ann Blair] makes the case that what we’re going through is like what others went through a very long while ago. Against the cartoon history of Shirky or Tooby, Blair argues that the sense of “information overload” was not the consequence of Gutenberg but already in place before printing began. She wants us to resist “trying to reduce the complex causal nexus behind the transition from Renaissance to Enlightenment to the impact of a technology or any particular set of ideas.” Anyway, the crucial revolution was not of print but of paper: “During the later Middle Ages a staggering growth in the production of manuscripts, facilitated by the use of paper, accompanied a great expansion of readers outside the monastic and scholastic contexts.” For that matter, our minds were altered less by books than by index slips. Activities that seem quite twenty-first century, she shows, began when people cut and pasted from one manuscript to another; made aggregated news in compendiums; passed around précis. “Early modern finding devices” were forced into existence: lists of authorities, lists of headings.

(my emphasis: source here)

shrines and sea caves

All right - last post of the day! I was turning over the idea of the shrine as a sea cave and typed 'shrine' and 'sea cave' into google. The hits included these two images of a Shinto shrine in a cave in Japan. Extraordinarily, the images date from the 1890s and are hand-tinted. Take a look:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/4185672920/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/4185670494/

transcription

I like the fact that transcription - and the transformation that transcription brings about - is part of one of your pieces for this project because it is an idea that connects all of our three terms: archive, exile, and voice. I'm posting this really just to remind myself that transcription was an idea that emerged fairly early in our collaboration and seems to be coming to the surface again now. One of the earlier postings on this theme was yours on Xu Bing and I'm putting a link to it here, just as a reminder:

http://archiveexilevoices.blogspot.com/2009/03/xu-bing.html

If the 'gifts' bestowed by the wheel and located on the computer are to include texts and images as well as music, then maybe I should contribute something textual on transcription.

human

When we spoke, I mentioned Nick Bax from the design consultancy, 'Human'. I'm thinking that he might be the guy to help us with the public display of our blog material and maybe also with the technology we use in the 'shrine' itself to give visitors access to music, text, and images. (Actually, I showed Jess some of his stuff and she's keen to involve him in thinking through the higher order issues as well - not how individual works are displayed but how to display explanatory text and so on.) Given all this, I thought you might like to look at his website. It's here:

http://www.humanstudio.com