The Memor - Eternal Return, 2019
VR experience for HTC Vive
The Memor involves VR technologies in friction with objects and the human ability to organize perception to build a world. Memory is the biotech of Eternal Return. As of 2023, the expanding series includes three artworks: The Memor, Stromatolites and Fugue, each taking place over 6x6 meters. Every new visitor, every return to the Memor changes it. Inside the installation, visitors' senses are triggered as an active medium to produce, experience, and become aware of the workings of memory and time within their own body.
In an encounter with a digital cluster modelled after the first form of memory, the single-cell bacteria, the oldest trace of life on earth, predating human experience by 3.7 billion years, augmented by the analogue touch of an unseen performer and digital code connected to a tracker, the visitor follows the cluster of points as it leads the way. The cluster also listens and responds with touch, vibrations, spatialized sound, scents, movement, and other sensory stimuli to conjoin the virtual and physical worlds. Physical fragments of stereolithographic resin-prints align with lidar scanning from found environments: a piano tuners’ workshop once located in London W1, a possibly melted arctic ice floe, a benevolent abyss, a pianist playing Bach’s Fugue in A minor. In the interaction between hardware, software and wetware, between body, experience and code, via touch and scent, in friction with sight and sound, visitors become witnesses of the capacity memory and time within their own body ( as a wetware repository, composed of minerals, bacteria, and traces of ancient energy systems ).
The series opens up a broader notion of virtual reality as not just a form of technology but also the ability to create relationships with surroundings. In the context of the Eternal Return series, Stromatolites become the human companion in speculative fiction on deep-time co-dependence within the cyclical nature of the universe. Speaking to Nietzsche, eternal return is an existential waveform, sending humans into cyclical patterns of life and death, moving the energy from one world to another while the matter stays behind.
Duration: 17:00 Min
Credits:
Creators:
Lundahl & Seitl with ScanLAB Projects
Script collaboration and author of accompanying fiction novel: Eternal Return – the Memor: Malin Zimm Dramaturge: Rachel Alexander
Pianist: Cassie Yukawa-McBurney performs 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
Production by Lundahl & Seitl (SWE) and ScanLAB Projects (UK)
Co-production: STRP Festival of Art and Technology Lundahl & Seitl
Producer: Emma Ward
Production Country: United Kingdom, Sweden
Year of Production: 2019
ScanLAB Projects team:
Matt Shaw, Max Čelar, Soma Sato, Manuela Mesrie,
Reuben Carter, Jacques Pillet, Will Trossell, Dorka Makai
IMAGES
VIDEO LINK
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lundahl & Seitl live and work in Stockholm. Their immersive solo projects reinterpret the medium of the exhibition as interpersonal processes via choreography, matter and time. The duo have developed a method and an art form comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies, juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organize perception into a world.
ScanLAB is a pioneering creative practice based in London, which digitize the world, transforming temporary moments and spaces into compelling permanent experiences, images and film. They Design online environments, immersive installations and objects. ScanLAB’s prime medium is 3D scanners. By critically observing these machines, a form of machine vision serving as the electronic eyes for billions of mobile phones and driverless vehicles, they hope to get a glimpse of the cartographers of the future.
If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.
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