A Palimpsest of Place and Past

Abstract

How does one perform memory? And in particular, how does one perform cultural memory, or what generally passes as history? This essay looks back to the ancient practices of the memory arts and ahead to today's location-based digital technologies, considering machines for the performance of memory. It begins by disambiguating the subtle but important distinctions between the projects of the memory palace and Camillo's theatre of memory, distinguishing the performance of space characteristic of the palace from the memory theatre's space of performance. Camillo's theatre introduced a new twist to the memory palace, functioning in some senses as a memory machine and requiring of its users a particular kind of performance. The essay explores these differences and their implications for thinking about performative navigation and the meanings bound up within the city as a historically accrued repository of material practices and subjectivities. We continue to have access to the city's materialities, of course, but how can we recover its experiential contingencies and the ephemeral views of its inhabitants? How might we give voice to its pluriform significance? How can we activate, articulate and put into play these assignments of meaning? The essay explores these questions and the possibilities of using location-based digital technologies as machines for the performance of urban space and memory. It extends the analogy of Camillo's creation, in which the scholar-spectator inhabits a physical theatre and generates memories through interaction with an elaborate and logical system of all knowledge, to the smartphone or iPad-equipped flâneur-spectator, doing something similar in his wanderings of the city. Location-aware technologies together with vast databases combine to generate personalized assemblages of public information, rendering any particular location – like Camillo's theatre – a space of performance.