There was always going to be a sense of passing with this group of students, the final cohort to graduate from our fifteen-month MA programme. Perhaps it was appropriate, then, that last year they came together to work on a joint project with the Warburg Institute in London, above the entrance to which is inscribed the word ‘Mnemosyne’, the Greek goddess of memory.

The institute is named after Aby Warburg, an art historian, unorthodox in many ways, who brought together his vast collection of images into relationships of unexpected affinities, a process which he called ‘interval iconology’. For Warburg this interval, this space between things, occurred not only on the large cloth-covered boards onto which he pinned his photographs, but between the things there pictured, the interval marked by a gesture to be found upon an ancient Cretan tomb and a Florentine painting both.

Warburg described his collection, his rearrangements of it, as ‘an engine for thinking’, a phrase which the students took as the title for their work, and perhaps we might think of writing similarly: not simply as the means by which one notes one’s thoughts, but the means by which those thoughts — what? — appear? Are had? More often they seem to have us.

An artwork extends in time, back to what anticipates it, forwards to what it might prefigure, and we should think on this now, and think on the work here contained. Of course, this is a moment to be celebrated, and we do so proudly, but more important is what comes next. And that has already begun.

— Jeremy Millar, Head of Programme, Writing MA

‘An Engine for Thinking’ can be found here.