Jakob Kudsk Steensen (B. 1987, Denmark) is an artist working with environmental storytelling through video games, VR, sound installations and immersive environments. He creates poetic interpretations about overlooked natural phenomena through collaborations with field biologists, composers and writers. Projects are based on extensive fieldwork in overlooked, rare or transforming ecosystems, where life and spaces are digitized as sound and 3D environments. Key collaborators include Musician ARCA, Composer and Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble Michael Riesman, Ornithologist and author Dr. Douglas H. Pratt, Korean band BTS, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Natural History Museum Berlin, among others.
Jakob has recently exhibited with his major solo exhibition “Berl-Berl” at ARoS Museum of Art, and in Berlin at Halle am Berghain, commissioned by LAS, and at Luma Arles with “Liminal Lands” for the “Prelude” exhibition. Other notable recent exhibitions includes “The Deep Listener” and “Catharsis” at Serpentine Galleries in London. He was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize at the 2019 Venice Biennale. His work has also shown at Sundance, TriBeCa, SXSW and at CPH:DOX film festival.
He received the Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission in 2019 to create his work The Deep Listener with Google Arts and Culture. He is the recipient of the best VR graphics for RE-ANIMATED (2019) at the Cinequest Festival for Technology and Cinema, the Prix du Jury (2019) at Les Rencontres Arles, the Webby Award – People’s Choice VR (2018), and the Games for Change Award – Most Innovative (2018), among others.
As part of the 2020 ArtBo edition, the Bogotá art fair created an online version of a large number of exhibitions due to the coronavirus. Hyphen Hub members of the artistic community, Janet Biggs and Jakob Kudsk Steensen were part of this curatorial selection. Steensen’s Re-animated (2018-2019) starts from the story of the mating song of the last Kaua’i bird that died in 1987, leaving the entire species extinct. This song was originally recorded in 1975 and then digitized in New York to later be uploaded to YouTube in 2009. Re-Animated is a response to this song, in this project Steensen makes a reconstruction of the habitat of the bird during that time period, in a process that led him to use scientific methodologies to find and scan contemporary fauna and flora in search of a faithful representation of the past.