Footprint 42: Mnemotechnics: Architecture, Archive and the Making of Memory
‘If we wish to remember many things, we must conceive of a building and walk through it.’ Quintilian’s instruction, written around 95 CE, poses the question directly: can we think of memory as something built? Architecture has long been a privileged medium for memory. Buildings, cities, monuments, ruins, codes, and institutions record human activity, values, know-how, forms of life, and claims to posterity – as Aldo Rossi’s account of the architecture of memory reminds us. The archive, too, begins as an architectural institution: the arkheion, the house of authority in which records are collected, guarded, made available or withheld. To ask how architecture remembers is therefore also to ask how memory is spatialised, institutionalised, governed and made operative. However, the archive is not merely an architectural artifact but also an architectonic one. For Kant, and later, Peirce, architectonics named the art of organising knowledge into a system – at once an architectural metaphor and a methodological model for relating its parts. Architecture may therefore not merely house archives, or only appear in archives as an object to be documented; it might also participate in the ordering of memory and in the stabilisation and destabilisation of what counts as accepted knowledge, or passes as historical truth. Yet the memory palace no longer seems walkable. The rapid expansion of datafication – the wholesale conversion of human activity, language, and built form into machine-readable records – and the reorganisation of those records through indexers, crawlers, and large language models (LLMs) have introduced a new kind of archival condition: vast, distributed, latent, and only partially legible. What was once governed by institutional thresholds, curatorial decisions, and physical constraints now accumulates at a scale and speed that exceeds any single act of retrieval or interpretation. How do we make sense of a massively distributed memory palace that can no longer be walked through? Of an arkheion that has multiplied, migrated and dispersed into infrastructures that might remain as authoritative as ever, but are increasingly difficult to locate?
Footprint 42 takes up these architectural questions through mnemotechnics: the techniques, models, media, institutions, infrastructures, environments and figures of knowledge through which memory is inscribed, stored, transmitted, retrieved and transformed. An archive is always already mnemotechnical, insofar as it does not merely store memory but actively produces it through specific material and procedural choices. Yet mnemotechnics also exceeds the archive, encompassing embodied practices, oral traditions and computational processes that operate outside or alongside institutional structures. From the arkheion to the server farm, these are the techniques through which memory is built.
Read as a mnemotechnical artifact, the archive might first appear as a technical or artificial apparatus. Its logic is not only hermeneutic but operational, not only interpretive but processual. Wolfgang Ernst reminds us that what the archive does to memory is inseparable from what the archive is made of. This provocation suggests that memory has never been natural or neutral, but is shaped by the specific devices, materials, protocols, institutions and infrastructures through which knowledge is inscribed, sorted, stored and retrieved. From the wax tablet to the filing cabinet, from microfilm to vector databases, each technology of memory establishes its own conditions of recordability, its own distribution of agency, and its own logic of what survives and what does not. Aleida Assmann’s distinction between canon and archive further clarifies that cultural memory is shaped not only by what is actively circulated, but also by what is stored in latency, withdrawn from immediate use, and made available for possible reactivation. Yet the archive might also be understood as a natural or material phenomenon. Michel Serres suggests that everything processes, stores, sends and emits information; the material world is already filled with mnemonic activity – from ice cores to radioactive isotopes ticking away. In this sense, the archive is no longer only technological or institutional. It becomes a way of decentring the human, who then appears not as the master archivist but a visitor within an archive of cosmic dimensions. Another reading brings the cultural, embodied and linguistic dimensions of memory to the fore. Memory does not always require stable physical records or inscriptions. Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire locates memory in embodied practices, rituals, performances and gestures, while Eric A. Havelock understands orality itself as a mnemonic technology, with the epic giving form not only to human experience but also to what has been learned, carried and transformed by its speakers. Today, the relations among these technical, material and embodied forms of memory are being reconfigured at a speed and scale with which architectural culture has barely begun to reckon. LLMs are trained on vast collections of documentation, producing new connections while flattening contexts and obscuring authorial sources. They produce a memory without conventional record that can be traced back, while also producing records without reliable provenance: synthetic, unstable and potentially hallucinatory. Rather than structuring knowledge through rules and hierarchies, they represent it in high-dimensional spaces where latent structure emerges from learned statistical relations. Spatially distant and rhetorically dematerialised, the infrastructure sustaining these systems rematerialises the supposedly weightless cloud as a landscape of environmental and geopolitical consequence.
Rather than treating the archive as a passive repository, this issue of Footprint approaches memory as something made operative through mnemotechnics: encoded, embodied, narrated, classified, spatialised, computed, damaged, repaired and transformed. We welcome scholarly articles, visual essays, archival narratives, speculative contributions, and historically grounded case studies. How do models and media, (memory) palaces and protocols, and institutions and infrastructures shape the ways architectural knowledge is produced and preserved – and, in turn, what we know and what we forget? Contributions may address non-digital and pre-computational technologies of the archive and what they continue to offer; oral, narrative, ritual and embodied techniques of memory; architecture as a medium of memory, from monuments and ruins to buildings, cities and landscapes; and the archive as architectural institution, from the civic record and municipal office to the library, museum, planning department, cadastral system, heritage agency and platform. We are equally interested in architectonic models of knowledge, classifications or constellations, ontologies and anti-ontologies, new epistemologies of access, memory without record, probabilistic archives, and high-dimensional knowledge spaces; natural, environmental, and material forms of memory, including traces, residues, sediments and atmospheres; counter-archives, contested archives, and the environmental and geopolitical costs of memory infrastructure. Through mnemotechnics, in this issue we ask how memory is built – and how architecture, as medium, institution, environment and model of thought participates in the making and ordering of worlds, and in the processes through which they are preserved, transformed, remembered and forgotten.
Authors proposing full articles of 6 000–8 000 words, including endnotes, are invited to submit a full manuscript via Footprint’s online platform, where submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.
Visual essays of 1 000–2 000 words, including endnotes, will be selected by the editors based on a draft containing text and images, emailed to the editors.
For both types of submission, the deadline is Monday, 31 March 2027, 23:59 CEST.
Authors should include a 100-word biography with their submissions. They are responsible for securing permission to reproduce copyrighted images and other materials.
For more information, please consult Footprint’s Author Guidelines and use the article template available here. Articles that do not follow the guidelines and the template will not be considered.
Correspondence should be directed to the editors, Eytan Mann and Agostino Nickl, at editors.footprint@gmail.com.
Footprint 42 is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2028.
