Presented by Luca Baptista, Room 2.17, ID Building, FCSH/NOVA, Lisbon
It might seem that memorization and creativity are at opposite ends, but actually the traditional art of memory emphasized the creation of striking images to be put in a fixed and ordered structure of places (loci) to facilitate recall. Those images should not be static, but rather imagines agentes – more like scenes taking place in each of the loci. The unusual, disgusting, beautiful, or amusing character of the scenes would make them stand out not only cognitively, but also emotionally and aesthetically.
The point of the art of memory was not simply recall, but the creation of retrieval systems for ideas, concepts, etc. These retrieval systems could, in turn, be used to aid the composition of new material (be it arguments or even whole philosophical treatises, as Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers argue was the case with Thomas Aquinas). So we have a link between mnemonics, imagination and creativity, operating in two steps. First, creative imagination was to be disciplined in the service of memorization – as ‘memory master’ Rob Cooke said recently in a conference promoted by Wired magazine, the art of memory is a ‘technology of imagination’. Second, new material could be created resorting to the retrieved imagines agentes. Here we have memorization in the service of creativity (this is not a circle; it’s more like a positive feedback loop).
But most importantly, it can be more than that. The technology of imagination would involve what Margaret Boden calls ‘p-creativity’ (psychological) but in certain cases it could help leading to ‘h-creativity’ (historical), as in the example of Aquinas mentioned above. In fact, this might also be at work in art. In The Art of Memory, Frances Yates speculates that Giotto’s paintings of the virtues and vices might have been inspired by stock images/scenes recommended in mnemonic treatises. And in The Gallery of Memory, Lina Bolzoni discusses at length the relationships between medieval and Renaissance iconography and mnemonics. My project is inspired by a quote from Yates: ‘The art of memory was a creator of imagery which must surely have flowed out into creative works of art and literature’.