Fall Apart Without Awareness

a reading of Lundahl & Seitl - Symphony of A Missing Room

If lining out similarity and difference between an event and an experience, then I might claim that, to an event, I cannot attribute predicates neither before nor during the moment the event happens. It happens as a struggle for experience rather than already being an experience. It presupposes an incommensurability of several elements while those elements might have been totally irrelevant to previous modes of perception. Events create attention towards perception. Unlike, experience might function entirely inside of previous perception logics, experience can immediately be called pleasure, warmth, love, tickle, violence, fear and so on. I admit, of course, that experience can offer sensitivity or awareness towards unexpected things, but exactly here the shit hits the fan: is it about attention towards perception or about awareness? What do we aspire to? Do we fall and fail and try again to catch the possible or do we waft around every possible phenomena through awareness? Let's suppose we're cool and smart and have no fear.

Symphony of a missing room can be read as exactly taking a turn towards awareness in the middle of the performance while having had a kickstart with layering visual, auditive and tactile perception of space, performance and body in the beginning. While having the eyes open and watching the actual museum space, the reclaimed virtual space stays present through exactly not being named. It appears only in my own desperate attempt of handling the different proposed layers. Tiny moments of the sensations and impressions making a different sense fleeting through the air. Following a strict proposal of watching, listening, feeling incompatible phenomenas, creating possibilities of scenes instead of consistent realities or, let's say, producing reality as a loose momentary construction, I would call engaging into being cool and having no fear – no fear of having nothing to say about what you perceive. The shit does hit the fan precisely. Clouds explode and the sky lightens purple, performance performs.

The later twist though identifies a virtual space with some random imagination. That might not even bother me too much as a proposal itself, if it wouldn't fall in the most common trap of contemporary democracy/experience/creativity economy: the performance wants to open space for personal imagination (which doesn't have anything to do with virtuality or creation of something different) and yet doesn't get its stuff together to try. It is ambitious on offering me an experience and, therefore, keeps on bringing me back to the creator's own imaginary space, teasing me to develop an image of the space and, in the next step, through the audio guide, leading me back to an imagined forest – some kind of björk empire that, in deed, is not compatible with my virtual space. This as a sidekick, moreover the created frustration by gentle but persistent reprehension through voices or hands of the team, reminds too much of neoliberal education strategies („Be creative! We will lead you back on the prescribed and supposedly right way anyway.“) or self-education for making me loose physical or mental integrity.

I say: no generosity on the experience. Make it impossible and I will fall apart without awareness.

Juli Reinartz

The unknown that we know

Now it’s getting messy, real and quite scary: the virtual is all that cannot be imagined, the reality of the virtual is the reality of change. In Lundahl & Seitl artwork:”Symphony of a Missing Room” which was presented in Gothenburg museum of Art, a virtual room is suggested “, an existing virtual parallel to the physical spaces". What’s missing in the room is the virtual room, the unimaginable possibilities of what a room can become, the unknown and cannot be known potential of a specific museum room. What the artists propose is this unknown room, which is exciting.

The proposal is executed as follows: the audience receives very good ear phones with a recorded voice (a voice with a typical lord-of-the-rings-princess flavor, definitely going for a fantasy vibe) which guides them through parts of the museum. Later, vision is restricted, and performers are leading the audience by hand. The audience is instructed to imagine the speculated narrative of the artists presented in the museum “A sensorium of imaginary architecture is built, often in direct relation to the concepts and visions of those artists whose works were placed in the museum long before.” An alternative room imagined by the artists is suggested to the audience where they are facing the choice to submit to the imaginary alternative or resist it. To block potential experience by submitting to an already inscribed narrative or deal with the frustration that come with resisting it. At that moment the focus turn to the imaginary the excitement and fear of the virtual is lost, replaced by what is already very possible and imagined.

How then can the idea of a virtual room be productive? How can the virtual stay virtual instead of being pinned back to a specific imagined alternative? In the first moments after receiving the earphones, a sensation of disorientation is created because the spectator cannot distinguish sound from the earphones and sounds from the museum, that sensation is then amplified by performers walking in the room where again the spectator doesn’t know if they are regular visitors of the museum or not. A certain potential exists in this situation, the effect of the earphones creates a friction between what the audience hears and what they see. Later, the depravation of vision creates a retreat to the imaginary, the potentiality is actualized in imagination. There actualization in the imaginary is very problematic, it doesn’t open up to the virtual. Art should open possibilities to experience, it should insist on staying on the border between virtual and actual, between experience and imagination. Art should be brave enough to discard of what is already know without anticipating what can be achieved with this action. It’s imperative to produce situations with potentiality through creating a constant disturbance and not to fall into an already known interpretation of an already confirmed imagination. “Symphony of a Missing Room” promises the virtual by inscribing an alternative imaginary room, instead of taking a step into an unknown and leaving the audience alone to face the virtual.



Uri Turkenich