The Memor - Eternal Return 2019 - ongoing
In a speculative fiction
about relationship and dependence
between digital objects and material substrates,
the Eternal Return series is an investigation
of virtual reality, not as technology,
but as a developing sensibility
toward a relationship with surroundings,
other life forms, and processes.
Download detailed PDF about the artwork
Shortlisted for the 2020 Lumen Prize, Eternal Return (2019) is a choreographed multi-sensory XR collaboration between ScanLAB Projects and Lundahl & Seitl.
Eternal Return is a series of artworks: together they form a choreographed, mixed-reality exhibition exploring the future of memory. Memory is the biotech of Eternal Return.
The Memor is the second artwork in the series. In it the visitor sees a grid with digital objects - created with high definition point-cloud data; collected by a Lidar terrestrial scanner surveying different places, buildings, landscapes and even traces of moving people. The point-cloud environments are at times stable, appearing as solid interiors of digital buildings that the visitor can walk inside. If a visitor is moving close to an object, the grid of the object archive deconstructs and operates as portals to other realities. The grid can dissolve, implode or spurt out a room.
Every object in the physical installation aligns with the scannings from found environments stored inside pointclouds. The Memor, involves VR technologies in friction with objects and the human ability to organize perception to build a world. 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. They become a wetware repository, composed of minerals, bacteria, and traces of ancient energy systems. Inside the headset, reality is reversed. Inside and outsides seem more permeable. We experience a world - when we reach out for an object, it touches our skin – but we do not see our hand that touches it. From the perspective of the digital world, our body is a ghost.
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CREDITS
Eternal Return by Lundahl & Seitl (SWE) and ScanLAB Projects* (UK).
The book Eternal Return - The Memor is written by architect and theorist Malin Zimm.
Script collaboration: Malin Zimm.
J. S. Bach’s Fugue in A Minor BWV 543 written for the organ, arranged by Liszt for piano, is performed by Cassie Yukawa-McBurney.
Dramaturgy by Rachel Alexander.
Performers: Pia Nordin, Lena Kimming & Sara Lindström.
* ScanLAB Projects team: Matt Shaw, Max Čelar, Soma Sato, Manuela Mesrie, Reuben Carter, Jacques Pillet, Will Trossell, Dorka Makai.
