PERSON
Giulio Camillo
Italian professor (c. 1480–1544) who constructed a physical Memory Theater he called a mens artificialis — the Renaissance's most literal attempt to externalize the cognitive palace.
Giulio Camillo spent the 1530s constructing a wooden Memory Theater designed to be walked into physically, with the spectator standing on the stage and the cosmos of knowledge arranged around him in tiers. Seven pillars corresponding to the seven planets divided the space into sectors. Each sector contained images encoding the structure of all learning. Camillo explicitly called his creation a mens fenestrata — a mind endowed with windows — and, more revealingly, a mens artificialis: an artificial mind. The phrase was coined four centuries before the Dartmouth workshop formally named artificial intelligence. His aspiration was not metaphorical. He believed the theater could provide any visitor with what trained memory practitioners achieved only after years of building.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Camillo was a transitional figure standing at the exact point where the art of memory was ceasing to be purely internal and beginning to imagine itself as external. The Memory Theater was a memory palace turned inside out — a building you could walk