The text below is an excerpt from the introduction of a newly published essay, followed by some context on my self-directed research. I recommend reading this newsletter before reading the essay.
‘Four hundred years before the term artificial intelligence emerged, debates about the development of “artificial memory” stirred. In contrast to the idea of natural memory, artificial memory involves using aids to help us remember. These include internal aids like memorization techniques that enrich personal memory and external aids like encyclopedias that enrich societal memory. [...]
However, not everyone saw the development of artificial memory in a positive light. In 1530, the eclectic physician Cornelius Agrippa cautioned against it:
Artificial memory would not be able to last for the briefest second without natural memory . . . [Artificial memory], by overburdening the natural memory with innumerable images of words and things, can lead those who are not content with the limits imposed upon them by nature to the point of madness.1
Worrying about madness from the experience of “innumerable images of words and things” might evoke a sardonic laugh from anyone alive now. Media saturation is the norm, and determining the line between natural memory and artificial memory seems almost irrelevant, as articles with lines like “the internet has become the external hard drive for our memories” proliferate.2 It’s a deeply ingrained narrative. From the known invention of writing 5,000 years ago to the creation of the World Wide Web, technology has been shaping how we remember. [...]
With memory and technology so closely woven together, each the shadow side of the other, popular understandings of memory can reveal understandings of technology.
Today, memory can’t escape computing metaphors. Memories are read, written, and erased through the brain, which means it is more or less the world’s most complex computer in this metaphor. We equate limits of natural memory with limits of computer memory. Unsurprisingly the roots of this metaphor can be found in Agrippa’s age, and it continues today with the development of artificial intelligence. With their wholesale embrace across societies, metaphors from computing suggest that all memory can be available as data. How to navigate remembering and forgetting this data remains less clear.’
So begins a newly published essay, Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity, which can be read in full on the Summer of Protocols website. As I mentioned in the previous newsletter, the motivation for writing this essay came from wanting to learn more about the origins of the memory-as-data metaphor, which led me to research older metaphors that have shaped our understanding of memory throughout history.
The essay represents the first stage of that research, largely tying together ideas I began thinking about in 2022 by reading primary scholarship on memory techniques, such as The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, Logic and the Art of Memory by Paolo Rossi, and work by Mary Carruthers. This scholarship demonstrates a throughline in epistemology from the ancient past to the present, in which memory techniques shape how we organize knowledge. In particular, Logic and the Art of Memory by Paolo Rossi traces how classical memory techniques went on to influence the development of encyclopedias, the quest for a universal, mathematical language that occupied figures like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and ultimately the advent of computing.
Reading this impressive scholarship, it became clear that while the categorization of “memory techniques” once helped to solidify scholarship on the topic, today it limits our understanding of them, effectively siloing so-called Western, Hellenic traditions from the rest of the world. This contextualizes contemporary archival practices primarily through these memory techniques, rather than examining ways of knowing embedded in traditions not always explicitly recognized as memory techniques.
While serving as a very useful starting point, accompanied by the work of Bernard Stiegler on memory, such scholarship unavoidably reifies remembering, sometimes leaving the entwined question of forgetting more adrift.
After I’d written the essay, my research wandered down several different paths, coming to focus especially on the relationship of memory to mindfulness traditions. I have woven these strands together in a nascent book manuscript, also titled Artificial Memory. The book will consider how emerging technologies will further shape our understanding of memory. More details about the book and its publication will be announced soon.
While, as often happens, the essay now represents a somewhat outdated form of my understanding of memory, I wanted to take the opportunity afforded by this newsletter to share a diagram that expresses an idea underlying my research last summer.
This diagram didn’t make it into the essay; more of a personal sensemaking exercise, it was an attempt to map throughlines of different approaches to memory exemplified by thinkers cited in the scholarship I read. The bottom line, the journey from rhetoric to logic, comes from the argument Paolo Rossi makes in his book. It represents an approach to memory that relies on “taxonomic arrangement,” meaning the organization of knowledge according to standardized, often graduated relationships between concepts. Some evolutionary tree charts can be seen as an example of this: they organize species according to their genetic descent lines, implying species share a moderately analogous relationship to their common ancestors in the chart.
In my diagram, the top, dashed line comes from a phrase I developed in the essay: “associative arrangement.” In contrast to taxonomic arrangement, associative arrangement represents an approach to memory that explicitly intends to create relationships between the concepts it associates, without necessarily standardizing relationships across concepts.
For example, the ancient memory technique known as the method of loci encourages practitioners to associate memories with specific locations. If you seek to memorize an epic poem, you could call to mind the image of your local church, using each alcove within it as a “memory image” to be associated with a specific stanza, verse, or word, after which, you should find yourself able to mentally traverse the church, summoning fragments of the epic poem as you pass each alcove.
The method of loci places less emphasis on the actual existence of the chosen location than on the practitioner’s ability to vividly recollect it in their imagination, encouraging varied relationships between concepts and their associated memory images. In the example above, a striking word could be associated with the memory image of an alcove, whereas a full stanza could be associated with the memory image of an altar—it’s up to the lone practitioner. Moreover, even for this lone practitioner, the relationship between a textual fragment and a memory image wouldn’t necessarily be analogous from one to the next.
This contrasts with evolutionary tree charts, which are meant to display an hypothesized scientific understanding of species that share moderately analogous relationships to their common ancestors. The charts don’t intend to “create” the relationships between species, and they don’t associate species with concepts that aren’t directly related to evolution (apart from the chart itself) for the purpose of memorization, as is the case in the seemingly unrelated, personally chosen locations used in the method of loci. In evolutionary tree charts, the chart is meant to fall into the background as an organizing principle, whereas in the method of loci, the chosen locations themselves are meant to stand out in vivid recollection to the practitioner.
I cite the revelatory work of art historian Aby Warburg among others as key in the practice of associative arrangement. While sounding abstract, the practice of associative arrangement can be grasped intuitively by anyone who regularly browsed tumblr in the early 2010s.
Using many more examples not mentioned here, the essay goes further into exploring these different approaches to memory techniques. While some scholarship suggests that taxonomic arrangement represents progress in the organization of knowledge, this conclusion proves far too simple when considered through a historical lens. Ultimately, I found that the distinction between taxonomic and associative arrangement is tenuous. The extent to which the organization of knowledge displays as opposed to creates relationships between concepts can be perpetually disputed. The distinction made in the essay does not represent these different approaches as mutually exclusive, nor do I mean to extol one over the other. They are different tendencies in approach.
Instead, by introducing this distinction in the essay, I tried to find language to describe a nascent change in our understanding of memory with the advent of computing. We now have machine-searchable memory, which implies new ways the organization of knowledge maps onto our everyday lives: a strange and layered mix of taxonomic, associative, and inhuman arrangements.
As emerging technologies create “synthetic memories,” we face the ongoing, gradual untethering of our current concept of memory from human senses. Ultimately, the idea that memory exists separately from our mindfulness of inhuman environments, like the slow geological creep of the mountains we live beside, may likely need to be what we let go. Memory exists when distributed; it is never somehow artificial or somehow natural. The essay represents another installment in my ongoing attempt to articulate these changes through self-directed research.
The essay Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity can be read in full on the Summer of Protocols website.
I wrote the essay while a Core Researcher in the 2023 Summer of Protocols program. Several projects by researchers in our cohort explored the topic of memory in different ways. I recommend looking at their beautiful work:
Four Doors - A Portal to Sacred Memory Protocols by Aaron Z. Lewis
Re-Move by Nahee Kim
Weaving Memory: How to Make a Memory Pouch by Spencer Chang
Composable Life: Us and Our Island by Fangting
Good Death by Sarah Friend
Death and the Death of Orkut by Alice Noujaim
You can sign up for the Summer of Protocols Protocolized newsletter to receive updates on all of the researchers’ work.
Thank you for reading. Currently, I’m open for writing commissions and limited work with clients. Write to contact@keikreutler.net to get in touch about working together.
Rossi, Paolo. Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, p. 67. Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers. London New York: Continuum, 2006.
Ward, Daniel M. Wegner, Adrian F. “The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for Our Memories.” Scientific American. Accessed September 1, 2023. doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1213-58
This is really good writing. Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for. I’m not sure if you read it before, but I think you’ll enjoy “Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer” by Seth Long.
It is interesting that you published this today as I read the Protocol Kit essay and loved it so much it sent me on a path of seeking water. I am so much looking forward to this forthcoming book and the reason why is I feel we are in a cosmological shift that is reorienting how we make sense of ourselves and our lives in space and time. There are two wonderful essays from Benjamin Bratton on NOEMA and something that Chenoe Hart mentioned in the townhall comments around how will people know how to store files and such, this all had me thinking about how do we harness intelligence. (in this thought memory relates to intelligence as experiential foundation that we draw from.)
Looking very much forward to more installments and the evolution of your perspective and thoughts on memory.