The Art of Memory

Abstract (German)
Dieses Buch faßt meine Forschungen zur Semiotik Giordano Brunos und zu deren Grundlagen in der Kosmologie und in der Gedächtnistheorie zusammen, wobei sowohl die Heterogenität als auch der Universalität des Denkers den Charakter dieses Buches geprägt haben. Es wird kein glattes Bild seiner Person oder seines Werkes angeboten, kein bejahender Jubel über eine epochale Leistung; wichtiger war mir die bis ins Detail gehende, manchmal mühselige Interpretation seiner Systementwürfe, wobei ich versucht habe, auch deren formales und technisches Niveau deutlich zu machen. Nicht seine Weltanschauung soll dargestellt werden, sondern sein Versuch, eine Vielfalt von Detaillösungen in eine wohlproportionierte, wenn auch ins Unendliche reichende Wissensarchitektur zu integrieren. Als Startsignal mag folgende Frage dienen: Inwiefern ist Giordano Bruno Semiotiker? Der Philosoph Bruno wird von Jacobi als Beispiel spinozistischer Tendenzen wieder ins Gespräch gebracht; später wird er für die spekulative Naturphilosophie, die aus Kants Schatten heraustritt, z.B. für Schelling und Hegel, interessant, und schließlich wird er als Märtyrer der Freiheit von den Antiklerikalen im Risorgimento hochgehoben. Der Heroenkult um die „Kopernikanische Wende" weiß mit Bruno nichts anzufangen, er ist kein Naturwissenschaftler, wie man ihn sich im 20 . Jh . wünscht. Von Yates ( 1964 ) wird er als Hermetiker und Ahnherr der Rosenkreuzer entdeckt, und plötzlich soll er auch noch ein Semiotiker sein ? Die Etikette „Semiotiker" ist allerdings weniger riskant als jene früher an Bruno herangetragenen. Bruno ist Philosoph, in einem allgemeinen Sinn , insofern er alle wesentlichen Aspekte: metaphysische, natur philosophische, ethische, semiotische, poetologische zum Entwurf eines möglichst kohärenten Bildes vereint, und er ist ein Renaissance-Philosoph, d .h. das antike Erbe, besonders jenes in den orientalischen Tiefen der Kulturgeschichte (Ägypten und Chaldäer) ist sein Ausgangspunkt. Selbst den Entwurf des Copernicus versteht Bruno in erster Linie als eine Wiederentdeckung antiker Einsichten. Es gibt jedoch in Brunos Schaffen einen roten Faden: die Architektur unseres Wissens, das Gedächtnis der Kultur- und Wissensgemeinschaft und natürlich desjenigen, der wie Bruno dieses Wissen zu einer Synthese vereinigen will . Seine Philosophie versucht, wie jede große Philosophie, alles, was wir wissen und was wir daraus an weiterem impliziten Wissen erschließen können, in einer Einheit zu denken, und diese Einheit ist notwendigerweise nur als Zeichensystem (begrifflich, argumentativ, bildhaft, als imaginierte Welt) zu realisieren.

Abstract(English)
This book summarizes my research on Giordano Bruno's semiotics and its foundations in cosmology and memory theory, whereby both the heterogeneity and the universality of the thinker have shaped the character of this book. No smooth picture of his person or his work is offered, no affirmative jubilation over an epochal achievement; What was more important to me was the sometimes laborious interpretation of his system designs, which went down to the last detail, and I also tried to make their formal and technical level clear. It is not his worldview that should be presented but his attempt to integrate various detailed solutions into a well-proportioned, albeit infinitely reaching aorganization of knowledge. The following question may serve as a starting signal: To what extent is Giordano Bruno a semiotician? Jacobi brings up the philosopher Bruno again as an example of Spinozist tendencies; later, he becomes important for the speculative natural philosophy emerging from Kant's shadow, e.g., for Schelling and Hegel. He is finally extolled as a martyr of freedom by the anticlericals in the Risorgimento. The hero cult around the "Copernican turn" does not know what to do with Bruno; he is not a natural scientist as one would wish in the 20th century. Yates (1964) discovered him as a hermetic, even an ancestor of the Rosicrucians. The etiquette "semiotic" is certainly less risky than the associations that Bruno used to have. Bruno is a philosopher, in a general sense, in that he combines all the essential aspects: metaphysical, natural philosophical, ethical, semiotic, and poetological to project a picture that is as coherent as possible, and he is a Renaissance philosopher, i.e. the ancient heritage, especially that in the oriental depths of cultural history (Egypt and Chaldeans) is his starting point. Bruno sees even the draft of Copernicus primarily as a rediscovery of ancient insights. However, there is a common thread in Bruno's work: the architecture of our knowledge, the memory of the cultural and knowledge community, and, of course, of those who, like Bruno, want to unite this knowledge into a synthesis. His philosophy, like every great philosophy, tries to think of everything that we know and what we can deduce from it as further implicit knowledge as a unit, and this unit is necessarily only available as a system of signs (conceptual, argumentative, pictorial, as an imagined world). to realize.

After the fall of the socialist regimes in South and Eastern Europe socialist statues and monuments were either removed, dislocated, or resignified. Several performance practices have been employed to engage with these statues and monuments. Focusing on the role played by artistic memorialization in the processes of dealing with the communist past, this article uses the concepts of "performative monuments" (Widrich) and "memory events" (Etkind) to analyze several examples of what can be called "performative monuments events." As many statues were removed, the statues witnessed performative practices in the process of their elimination. The monuments that were conserved were dislocated and exhibited as part of "sculpture park museums" and observed nostalgic, ironic practices of tourists that perform the memory of communism by interacting with the monuments. This article analyzes several examples in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania of socialist monuments that have remained in place or that have been dislocated and resignified by contemporary artists using performative practices of memory events that engage monuments. This exploratory research argues that artists, through their "performative monuments events," try to bring the people back to replace the statues with "living statues" and to question the absurd megalomaniac monuments using metaphorical, material instruments.

This article analyses 'Project 1990' (2010–2014) as an example of 'art of memoriali-sation'. The project included twenty temporary artistic interventions on the empty pedestal of the former statue of Lenin in Bucharest. The author compares this example of art of me-morialisation to other memory strategies found in the Romanian public space after 1990. Building on James Young's concept of anti-monument, 'Project 1990' questioned the ways in which communism is remembered in Romania, and how the transition to democracy, in the opinion of many of the exhibiting artists, failed. This curatorial project is a good example of the aestheticisation of memory—that is the anti-nostalgic and ironic treatment of symbols of the past, among which Lenin himself. Caterina Preda is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Bucharest. In the last decade, Romania has registered an increasing number of artistic productions dealing with its communist legacy. These productions have covered different topics, various media, and a plurality of perspectives. An interesting example is 'Project 1990' curated by Ioana Ciocan between 2010 and 2014, which included twenty artistic interventions on an important site of memory in Bucharest: the empty pedestal of the former Lenin statue. The tone of these artworks was ironic and anti-nostalgic, simultaneously using and evoking an aestheticised version of the communist past. This article investigates 'Project 1990' as an anti-monument, situating it within the Romanian art of memoria-lisation. Furthermore, the article questions how Ciocan's work, including the curated installations, wanted to incite memorialisation. These works of anti-monumentality stand in an interesting contrast to other memorial strategies found in the Romanian public sphere after 1990, namely: the strategy of official forgetting; public and private initiatives to promote a history and memory of victimhood; and personal as well as socially networked nostalgia. The space occupied by 'Project 1990', which was previously physically empty but emotionally fraught, provides an interesting window into the way communism is

In this article the adjective “comparative” simply means that I want to establish a comparison between the history of memory and the psychological implications which it involves. Too many times the art of memory has been studied only from a historical and cultural point of view without considering the psychological and – above all – the strategic value of its findings.

This article aims to analyse a little known, yet extremely important, phenomenon of reception of
Сlassical antiquity and its legacy in the Middle Ages. It deals with the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, a biblical anthology created at the end of the 12th
century by Peter of Poitiers, theologian and teacher at the Cathedral school of Paris. In
the prologues, Peter himself declared that the purpose of his work was to help his students to fix in memory the complex
biblical material. For this reason the text was written in a simplified and resumptive way, and it was also accompanied by an unusual apparatus of images that visualized the main concepts which the students should learn and remember. Peter seems to have derived the figurative system from Greek and Roman mnemonic treatises. Through selected case
studies, I aim to demonstrate how
Сlassical antiquity and its legacy made a contribution in the creation of that specific art
system, tracing the connections between ancient theory and mediaeval practice.

Il testo può essere letto e scaricato al seguente link: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1165185
Si dà notizia della scoperta di un nuovo manoscritto del "Teatro della Memoria" di Giulio Camillo (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ott. Lat. 2418 parte III, cc. 881r-908v).

This is a review of Michael Perlman's book, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima. The review takes up the classical Ars Memoria tradition and explores Perlman's soulful and incisive reflections on the Art of Memory and its relevance for cultivating an ethical, compassionate imagination and memory to address the specific challenges of our times.

The classical art of memory, based on Cicero’s system of loci and imagines, was revived during the Renaissance and developed further in the course of the sixteenth century. Toward the end of the century, however, its structure became so complex that many intellectuals found it impracticable. Abandoning the traditional method of purely mental system, they increasingly made recourse to “secondary memories” such as commonplace books, index cards and Petrus Ramus’s dichotomic diagrams.
The Flemish mnemonist Lambert Thomas Schenkel (1547–c.1630) represents a crucial moment during this transformation in knowledge management. His treatise De memoria (1593) epitomizes the simultaneous summit and limit, or even collapse, of the tradition. There Schenkel explains how to construct an almost unrealizable palace of memory with millions of loci. He also introduces a sort of methodus studiendi, based on dichotomic diagrams and a thorough division of materials, so as to learn all scholastic disciplines by heart in a short span of time.
By analyzing Schenkel’s ‘hybrid’ system, my paper addresses that crucial moment at which the declining art of memory and rising humanist methods of learning were fused inextricably, paving a way to the ideal handling of encyclopedic knowledge.

Le support plastique de cette oeuvre datée entre 1550 et 1555 a été organisé pour soutenir deux usages très différrents de l'image, produisant deux discours distincts:
- le traitement d'un sujet apparent qui combine Eve à Pandore pour construire une allégorie in absentia de la permanence éternelle du mal plantée au coeur du royaume de France.
- un discours crypté par Art de mémoire utilisant l'Idea del theatro de Giulio Camillo, qui définit secrètement la mauvaise et la bonne monarchie.