The Greek Lyric Poet Simonides (566-468 BC) is famous for recalling the name and location of each guest crushed in the rubble of the dining hall of Scopas. His mnemotechnic had a lasting impression on the art of rhetoric, but it did not impress Themistocles, who commented as follows: "I would rather a technique of forgetting, for I remember what I would rather notremember and cannot forget what I would rather forget." Themistocles’ clever rejoinder is
especially apt at a time when mnemotechnologies serve both to externalize memory and shape human identity, leading Viktor Mayer-Schönberger to praise “the virtue of forgetting in the digital age.”
This course is about memory and its externalization through technics. This is also a course about understanding the human as a technical animal, an animal that strives constantly to externalize itself. If memory, the capacity to archive, is what distinguishes us from other species, what happens when we become forgetful, either by virtue of cognitive impairment or thanks to digital archives that remember for us?
These questions will be considered by students in this course as they read through a broad range of texts, from Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence to Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young & In My Prime, a novel about Alzheimer’s Disease set in Southern Ontario. The theoretical component of the course will be applied through the students’ collaboration with UW’s Murray Alzheimer’s Research and Education Program (MAREP). Working with MAREP, students will develop projects that make use of digital media to advance Alzheimer’s research and education. The projects may range from the creation of hands-on digital “make” workshops for Alzheimer’s patients to the design of an app to improve communication between persons with dementia and their families.
