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BERLIN 2022 /
OSLO & OTHER CITIES 2024

Lundahl & Seitl with ScanLAB Projects

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Eternal Return: The Memor (2019–2022)

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Unseen choreography of movement and touch—in friction with—an XR environment based on stereolithographic resin prints on steel scaffold, terrestrial laser scans, and three-dimensional sound ● Duration: 17’ ● Location: Archenhold Observatory, Museum of Celestial Science ● Image credits: Lundahl & Seitl with ScanLAB Projects, Eternal Return: The Memor, installation view from Lundahl & Seitl’s solo exhibition Monograph, Norrtälje Konsthall(2021) ● Photo: Joakim Olsson. Courtesy the artists.

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With the visitor’s body and senses as the active medium, triggered through VR, hyperconnected objects, and live performance, Eternal Return reveals how memory allows for a string of data to be passed through matter across time. From Earth’s deep past as unicellular cyanobacteria, through to its post-anthropocentric future, the living are closely connected with geology: the surface of the earth, and matter stored within a lineage of objects and tools, including the hammer, the piano, and the radio technology of Marconi.

Eternal Return by Lundahl & Seitl and ScanLAB Projects is accompanied by “The Memor” by Malin Zimm, a text of speculative fiction that offers an expanded narrative framework for the artwork. 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.


Eternal Return: 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 into 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. Lundahl & Seitl’s The Memor is a choreographed room that passes through the visitor’s body like a song.

Performers: Evgenia Chetvertkova, Franziska Gerth, Christine Sollie, Michiyasu Furutani

Lundahl & Seitl

Lundahl & Seitl’s immersive methods include staging visitors’ guided movement to augment and alter reality. The virtual experience in their works is created with peculiar objects such as sightless goggles or methods of choreographed touch by reverse engineering visual stimuli. Through a heuristic relationship to process, and created in collaboration between disciplines, the duo has developed an art form and method containing staging, choreographed movement, instructions, sculpture, spatial sound, and augmented and virtual reality. Their performances focus on the resonance between a world and its inhabitants, drawing attention to the connectivity and interdependence that exists within any given environment.

Lundahl & Seitl’s works have been exhibited worldwide, including in the UK at Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, Royal Academy of Arts, Cell Project Space, and NOMAD Projects; in Germany at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berliner Festspiele, Hamburger Kunsthalle, MMK2 and Kunstmuseum Bonn; in France at Center Pompidou-Metz, and Avignon Festival; in Belgium at S.M.A.K, STUK and Museum M; in Switzerland at Kunsthalle Bern; in Austria at Steirischer Herbst and Museum der Moderne; in India at the Kochi Muziris Biennale; in South Korea at Wooran Foundation; in Iceland at Cycle Festival; in Norway at Momentum 8 – Tunnel Vision, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art; in Sweden at Weld, Nationalmuseum, Dramaten, Accelerator, and Magasin III.

In 2022, they showed their work within the Temple of Alternative Histories at Kassel Staatstheater, in conjunction with Documenta Fifteen; they are part of the MIT Media Lab’s Art, Culture and Technology Programme. Lundahl & Seitl live and work in Stockholm, Sweden.

ScanLab Projects

ScanLAB Projects digitizes the world, transforming temporary moments and spaces into compelling permanent experiences, images and film. They design online environments, immersive installations and objects. Their primary medium is 3D scanning, a form of machine vision that they argue is the future of photography and much more beyond. As the electronic eyes for billions of mobile phones and driverless vehicles 3D scanners are the cartographers of the future. By critically observing places and events through the eyes of these machines our work hopes to glance at the future we will all inhabit.

Founded in 2010, they have worked with leading architects, broadcasters, scientists and artists from across the world. ScanLAB operates from concept, through on location scanning, to delivered products. Their work has featured in major TV documentaries and cinema screenings, been widely published and exhibited internationally.

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