The Bonfire of the Models
David M. Berry * Bernardino of Siena organising a vanities bonfire, Perugia, from the Oratory of San Bernardino, by Agostino di Duccio, built between 1457 and 1461 "Without waiting, I have spoken to you of my computer, of the little portable Macintosh on which I have begun to write. For it has not only been the first substrate to support all of these words. On a beautiful morning in California a few weeks ago, I asked myself a certain question, among so many others... I asked myself what is the moment proper to the archive, if there is such a thing, the instant of archivization strictly speaking, which is not, and I will come back to this, so-called live or spontaneous memory (mnēmē or anamnēsis), but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate. Was it not at this very instant that, having written something or other on the screen, the letters remaining as if suspended and floating yet at the surface of a liquid element, I pushed a certain key...