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Cicero developed orations by assigning key themes and concepts to rooms in an imaginary villa, which he mentally navigated during recitations. Centuries later, medieval scholars and university students expanded on the idea, and used Cicero’s mnemonic device to manage data by constructing buildings and cities in which every room, every feature, represented something of significance. By walking through the rooms and streets, associations emerged that aided memory, while the arrangement of the thought objects themselves allowed scholars to examine the relationship between areas of knowledge.
Artists Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg explored the connection between visualization, spatial awareness, and language in Apartment. As users enter sentences a blueprint emerges, with the size and arrangement of the rooms based on a semantic analysis of the words chosen. To further examine the structure and meaning of each sentence, Apartment also converts the text into a three-dimensional object. Individual entries are then grouped into buildings and cities. Visitors can restructure cities by selecting themes–organizing the buildings into concentric zones that reflect the intensity of the concept.
. Historian Shae Davidson's research interests include public policy and the relationship between culture and civil society. His publications range from articles on industrial history to absurdist poetry.
