I saw this post at Rhizome, which I thought was intriguing, not because the piece (by Guthrie Lonergan) is all that interesting or that well executed but because it reminded me of the idea of muscle memory.

Lonergan’s keyboard redrawn from memory mimicks in some way the work of Vic Muniz when he drew famous photographs from Life magazine, from memory, including this image of the famous V-Day kiss in Time Square. Vic seems a bit more adept than Lonergan.

Add to that the fact that Lonergan had two significant advantages, first, the name of the keyboard is "QWERTY," after the first six letters (he failed to get even that right) and second, muscle memory. Anyone with any typing skill can probably type minus the actual keyboard. I tried it myself and got all the letters correct.

Muscle memory has the strange quality of being automatic. I heard another story on the radio of a musician who put down the guitar for several decades only to pick it back up an remember not only the music and lyrics but cues to the drummer and the crowd.

It sort of made me wonder if it would be possible to actually use muscle memory for non-movement memory. To hack ones body into a new storage device. It would turn the act of recall into a performance, with each movement detailing a different bit of data. We already do this with things like passwords and phone numbers. I can’t help but think that dances like the hula use this form of memory. It would be curious to see if something  substantial could result.