A Missing Room

A Missing Room is an immersive artwork adapted for domestic settings in extraordinary times.

With this app downloaded on your phone you get to experience an immersive artwork inside your home. The work: Symphony of a Missing Room, was first exhibited in 2009 at the National Museum, Sweden (produced by Weld) reflecting the museum as a phenomenon, and architecture.

Like a ‘waste-mould-cast’ it activates a symbiotic state between the artwork's perceptual triggers, its museum visitors and the prevailing environment, leaving only experience and memories behind. For over 10 years, the work continued to be shown internationally, opening up new formats and collaborations in the museum environment. Through the years the work started reflecting back on itself, even catching a glimpse of itself. Symphony had become a work of art collecting museums. By incorporating its environments as part of its body, Symphony gradually made itself independent of the institutions where it was conceived.

Or perhaps only partly shared... The experience is reminiscent of how individuals from different generations live side by side, interacting with each other but somewhat failing to coincide and share each other's realities. Inside the missing room, visitors pass through walls, into tunnels that travel through a network of past exhibitions and museums. Other artists, dead and alive, far and near, echo into the symphony as an endless conversation. In the process of creating this potential room of reciprocity between two people, the work serves as a companion, providing a score for interpersonal sensibilities that risk going extinct or being forgotten if not practiced or cared for.

During these extraordinary times when many cultural institutions are closed and public places are empty, a version was made so that two people can perform / experience Symphony together inside a domestic setting. It is a digital artwork that turns mobile screens into projector lights. By alternating between receiving and guiding roles, throughout the experience you will be asked to close your eyes and follow a score of choreographed suggestions. In tandem with a three-dimensional sound in headphones the process augments a virtual room, shared only between the two of you.

Background:

Symphony, 2020 is a composite experience of Symphony's previous incarnations from some twenty international museums and biennials such as; Martin-Gropius-Bau / Berlin Festspiele, Royal Academy of Arts, Momentum 8 - Tunnel Vision, Center Pompidou, MMK2 Frankfurt, S.M.A.K, Museum M, Bern Biennale and the 2nd Kochi Muziris Biennale.

It reflects a variety of works such as One Million Years, 1969 - by On Kawara; No More Reality, 1991 - by Phillipe Parreno; Plaster Surrogates, 1982 - by Alan Mcollum, and a photograph by Paul Almasy: Louvre, Paris, 1942.

In Autumn 2020 a first draft of a new commission by Uppsala Art Museum will be released on this App. The work will be developed during one year and then presented as a solo show, to be later acquired into the museum’s collection.

Thanks and credits to:

Nandi Nobel (Designer of the App’s symbols), Emma Ward (Production), Rachel Alexander and Sara Lindström (Dramaturgy and choreography), Genevieve Maxwell, Lisette Drangert, Laura Hemming Love, Catherine Hoffman, Pia Nordin, Moa Hansen, Colin McLean, Lisen Ellard, Lena Kimming (Performers in the Symphony Series since 2009). Voices: Alba Lundahl Seitl & Saskia Vasovic Stefansdotter.

Lundahl & Seitl

Developed by DVA - Creative Technology Studio