Non-linear Thinking: Camilo's Theater of Memory & Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne as Archive Models for the (Virtual) Conservation and Communication of Knowledge (original) (raw)
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In 1905, Aby Warburg, a german art historian of Jewish origin interested in western classical culture proposes a heuristic research method on memory and images. Holder of a huge image catalogue, Warburg devises a procedure to investigate and represent unobvious relations system trough collage and montage: the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Process allows replacing of images or introducing new elements to establish new relationship, an open & infinite procedure that creates a personal cartography thus making possible new constant rereading. Barely developed due to his premature death, Aby Warburg’s lessons permeate all the coming visual culture.
Memory and the Digital Archive of Contemporary Art
2021
This article outlines some reflections about digital reality, contemporary art production, and possible ways of archiving and constructing memory through and for a historiography of contemporary art in light of the project Archivo Español de Media Art / Spanish Archive of Media Art (AEMA/SAOMA). In the first part I propose a definition and an account of media art and its artifacts. In the second part I present and describe the SAOMA project, and its antecedent, the MIDECIANT museum project, and discuss the conceptual and technical requirements of an archive devoted to the media arts. In the third part I sketch some interconnections between the concepts of memory and archive with reference to new media art and outline the difficulties that are inherent to any effort to define and archive these art forms. The final section includes some concluding thoughts and a brief explanation of what I regard as the most urgent needs for any archival project in the realm of digital art (digital re...
Aby Warburg: The Collective Memory as a Medium for Art
Anastasis Research in Medieval Culture and Art, 2021
In this paper, I intend to study the contribution of Aby Warburg, a cultural theorist and an art historian, especially his concern with the relations between memory and history, relations that have been theorized in the late 20th century, but which Warburg anticipated, to a certain degree. In his writings, there can be identified those relations that make memory a metahistorical category or an anti-historical discourse (Pierre Nora, Yosef Yerushalmi); then, his writings can be connected with those of Maurice Halbwachs, the first who approached memory as a social phenomenon. Thus, according to Warburg, collective memory can be regarded as a medium for art, which ensures the survival of images and pathos formulas even when the violence of historical development leads to a decline of the creative spirit. One might say that via a detour through the archaic (Pueblo Indian culture), Warburg managed to reduce the distances which the historical method had established to the Antiquity's vestiges (process that started in the Renaissance). His hypothesis was that the employment in the historical development of Western civilization leads to the atrophy of certain potentialities of the human spirit, which can be addressed in the anti-historicist discourse, specific to postmodernity. In the last part of the paper, I propose to dwell on The Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg’s last project, as a visual synthesis of the research that he conducted throughout his life.
Memory Studies, 2020
Can digital platforms such as the database and the virtual museum offer new possibilities of the archive? What concept of the archive can be pursued by contemporary practices that are appropriate and explore the digital forms in order to engage with the radical transformation of the experience and memory of older arts and media? This article seeks to address these questions by investigating Ouvroir (2008), a Second Life virtual museum created by Chris Marker. The author argues that Marker's model of the virtual museum allows for the dialectic of the archive as marked by both new possibilities for documentation and memory and its inherent room for loss, fragmentation, and disorientation. This dialectical concept of the archive challenges not simply the traditional concept of the archive that presumes the totality of preservation and the systematic classification of information but also the utopian account of the virtual museum or archive, according to which its simulation, free accessibility, and universal connectivity contribute to overcome the physical museum or archive.