suzanne stein

The Kim Game, #4 in the Area Sneaks Sheets series, is a transcription of an audio-only work which layers three performances, from three different places and times. And more.

You can purchase a print copy, or download a PDF here.

You can listen to the audio here.

From The Kim Game:

“Frances Yates’s second important stopping place is the sixteenth century memory theater of the Italian Giulio Camillo, famous in his lifetime and afterwards soon forgotten until resurrected here. By the time we reach Camillo, the theater of information, of memory for ideas and things, has taken shape not as a visualization in the mind, but as a real building, an actual theater, a tiny one, with a stage sized for just two people, that is, Camillo himself, and the King of France, who has commissioned it. In the interior of the theater, where the audience would be, is instead arranged the history of the creation of the architecture of the world, divine and humankind, in descending chronology from Art to Nature. In this inversion of the theater, the actor on the stage is a spectator, who by seeing knows. By the time we get to Giordano Bruno, Ms. Yates’s real target, the art of memory is a highly coded system of magical, hermetic information, set into revolving wheels of images and seals returned to text and laid out or hinted at by Bruno in many pages, and these systems are to be deployed, again, by a kind of creative visualization, and in language, onto the structures of real cities, to be remembered, yes, or better, to transform the structures they touch. And now no single building should suffice— when you have exhausted the palaces of Rome, Bruno writes, any Parisian houses will do. A moral, or magic, mnemonic, a weapon built for personal, spiritual, and political transformation.”