Lundahl & Seitl | A Language of What May Not Be Said

Part of the Eternal Return Series                                                                                                                                             Lundahl & Seitl + ScanLAB Projects

Medium: XR environment based on stereolithographic resin prints on steel scaffold, terrestrial laser scans, and three-dimensional sound —in friction with—Unseen choreography of movement and touch. 

Duration: 17’

‘“The Memor” is a space that evokes the human ability to move beyond the present. The first encounter is with a stromatolite, a fossil that predates the human experience by 3.7 billion years. 3D-printed objects act as triggers in a series of environments: a piano workshop, a benevolent abyss, complex rooms where Virtual Reality can be defined as an ability rather than a form of technology. The capacity of memory allows the human mind to experience music rather than perceiving one tone after another. “The Memor” is a choreographed room that passes through the visitor’s body like a song. 

The installation is accompanied by: The Memor by Malin Zimm a speculative fiction text and an expanded narrative framework. Objects and scenes in the installation thus take on a multitude of experiential modes: physical, virtual, narrative, and emotional. The fiction expands as the art installation evolves, yet its parts can be read and experienced in any order as a non-linear envelope. As a piece of speculative fiction, the text moves from the old world to the new, weaving history and fiction together by picking up facts floating in the tide and finding a new use for them in the narrative. The story contains numerous references to demonstrate the method of “playing” the internet for facts and news, encyclopedic knowledge, and archives. The various references are composed together to form a new interpretation of the events in and around the world as it is presented to our senses.

Credits

Eternal Return, 2019 / Lundahl & Seitl and ScanLAB Projects

Max Čelar: VR designer and developer

Malin Zimm: Script collaboration and author of the speculative fiction The Memor – a companion to the exhibition

Rachel Alexander: Dramaturge

Cassie Yukawa-McBurney performed J. S. Bach’s Fugue in A Minor BWV 543 written for the organ, arranged by Liszt for piano 

Performers: Pia Nordin, Rachel Alexander, Sara Lindström, Lena Kimming, Helena Lambert, Christine Sollie, and local performers

Production by Lundahl & Seitl (SWE) and ScanLAB Projects* 

Co-production STRP Festival of Art and Technology 

Lundahl & Seitl Producer: Emma Ward

*ScanLAB Projects team: Matt Shaw, Soma Sato, Manuela Mesrie, Reuben Carter, Jacques Pillet, Will Trossell, Dorka Makai.

Duration: 17’   

Since its inception in 2009 at the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, the artwork has been hosted by twentyfold internationally renowned museums and Biennials. Earlier commissions have included Martin-Gropius-Bau, Royal Academy of Arts, Momentum 8 – Tunnel Vision, Centre Pompidou Metz, MMK Frankfurt, S.M.A.K, Bern Biennale and Kochi Muziris Biennale. 

Participants wear white goggles that induce a spatial white-out, partly rendering our sensory interface to the world incomplete, and partly enabling a new relationship with the surroundings by blurring the distinction between sensing/reasoning, and body/mind. A guiding hand gradually earns our trust, while a whisper in the ear synchronizes our movement and breathing with the architectural sound in the headphones, closing the sensorial loop between our body and the imagined space through a reversed engineering of the vision. 

The iteration of Symphony of a Missing Room showing at MIT emerged from the latest public showing of the work at Temple of Alternative Histories at Kassel Stadtteater, in conjunction with Documenta Fifteen. Building from an internal exercise on how to become a river, of shaping and being shaped by different topographies, the work echoes natural processes in a practice of extending one’s sensory experience into one’s surroundings and merging with it through the relationship. 

In Symphony of a Missing Room, the value of agency and guidance is constantly negotiated in a dance of listening, adapting, and responding, not only to the immediate movement of your unseen guide but also to the objects and events from the past that have been integrated into the works’ choreographic score. As triggers for future experiences, these objects and events are now surfacing and played out horizontally in the present relationship and friction between visual and auditory organs and the nerves of the skin between the two bodies temporarily becoming the artwork. 

A multitude of ideas, experiences, thoughts, and reflections echoes inside the Symphony as an endless conversation between presences and absences.