surprised by is its striking precision, its exhaustiveness, its depth. We have a hard time believing so many details can be stored and retrieved without loss in something as untechnological as ourselves. On the other hand, we accept without flinching that such a memory technique is a creative act. A memory palace isn’t populated by the objects of remembrance themselves, but by elaborate visual cues, invented so as to maximize the likelihood of one’s mind retaining them. This is done by exaggerating relevant traits (a giant is easier to remember than someone slightly taller than average), and by adding arbitrary sexual imagery wherever possible (as explicit content is known to trigger the attention mechanism). Take a stroll through a memory palace and you might see something closer to a line-up of dirty forgeries than to your usual portrait gallery. The first image in the set of Assembly Instructions devoted to the artist Simon Fujiwara, for instance, depicts the partially crumbled statue of an oversized penis [PLS. 25, 26]. Towers, too, bear a clear associative relation with the phallus, and towers abound in this set of works, both in the form of the biblical myth and as a long, central skyscraper spanning several stacked images. In one of those pictures, Simon Fujiwara is portrayed as sitting on a copy of the tower of Babel as depicted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Moreover, all of these symbols not only act as “memory enhancers,” making their content more memorable, they also double as standins for specific notions or emotions that Singh presumably attaches to what they depict. The tower and the phallus could also refer to the focus of Fujiwara’s research on the politics and ethics of sex life, just as the tower of Babel and the skyscraper could be proxies for professional ambition (Fujiwara’s, or Singh’s own, in thinking of a “colleague”). Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, in his seventeenthcentury treatise on the art of memory, already acknowledged the importance of filling one’s memory palace with symbols that have a double use (mnemonic and associative). This could be a sign we’re on the right track.
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