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| monster_code [2025-05-06 07:04] – theunkarelse | monster_code [2025-05-06 08:26] (current) – theunkarelse |
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| * [[memory_craft]] short intro to techniques | * [[memory_craft]] short intro to techniques |
| * [[memory_character]] Theun's documentation for developing mnemonic characters, cast, pseudo pantheon | * [[memory_character]] Theun's documentation for developing mnemonic characters, cast, pseudo pantheon |
| Humans as a species operate within a framework of symbolic representation that enables us to articulate ideas, share ideas, plan, design, make decisions, and reflect. We associate this with literacy, but for the majority of human evolution, we used very different frameworks, sometimes even the landscape itself to organise thought. All over the world cultures associated knowledge to features in the landscape; the Aboriginal songlines of Australia, the Native American pilgrimage trails, and the Neolithic causeways and henges of Europe. This is landscape as mind-palace. Bringing practices together from a wide range of sources I’ve been experimenting in my area of Amsterdam with these almost entirely forgotten ‘techniques’ of ‘applied animism'. It has transformed not just how I think, but also how I perceive and relate to my environment and my view of the human organism. | Written language serves us in many ways, but it is a recent phenomenon. For a much longer period humans relied on forms of encoding that took advantage of neurological features of the human mind, that lie relatively dormant in the literate mind. To tap into this potential Monster Code explores preliterate modes of encoding and organising information, knowledge or even wisdom.\\ |
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| | **Landscape as mindpalace:** All over the world cultures associated knowledge to features in the landscape; the Aboriginal songlines of Australia, the Native American pilgrimage trails, and the Neolithic causeways and henges of Europe. In MonsterCode a local shoppingstreet is the area in which Theun learns to encode timelines. |
| | === current walks: === |
| | * timeline of **US presidents as a framework for world history** encoded into shopping street (Jan Evertsenstraat, Amsterdam) |
| | * timeline of **hominids** and **European Proboscidea** encoded into opposite side of shopping street (each block 1 million years) (Jan Evertsenstraat, Amsterdam) |
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| ==== Monster Code ==== | ==== Monster Code ==== |
| * code: **our memory for geography**: we may not be great at remembering list, but we are amazingly good at remembering places. Imagine your house. Almost nobody struggles to remember where the living room, bedroom, kitchen, toilet are, or even the furniture in those rooms. Modern memory champions still use this technique known as a memory-palace. Often the greek [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci|method of loci]] is pointed out as its origin, but that vastly underestimates how fundamental these principles were, stretching over tens of thousands of years of human history and across all continents. | * code: **our memory for geography**: we may not be great at remembering list, but we are amazingly good at remembering places. Imagine your house. Almost nobody struggles to remember where the living room, bedroom, kitchen, toilet are, or even the furniture in those rooms. Modern memory champions still use this technique known as a memory-palace. Often the greek [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci|method of loci]] is pointed out as its origin, but that vastly underestimates how fundamental these principles were, stretching over tens of thousands of years of human history and across all continents. |
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| === current walks: === | |
| * timeline of **US presidents** encoded into shopping street (Jan Evertsenstraat, Amsterdam) | |
| * timeline of **hominids** and **European Proboscidea** encoded into opposite side of shopping street (each block 1 million years) (Jan Evertsenstraat, Amsterdam) | |
| * mindpalace of Dutch **damselflies** (into branch structure of tree at FoAM's MidWest garden) | |
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| === structures: === | === structures: === |
