Worlds That Breathe: Jakob Kudsk Steensen on The Song Trapper and Ecologies of the Virtual

12 Jan 2026

Interviewby Alexander Burenkov

Worlds That Breathe: Jakob Kudsk Steensen on The Song Trapper and Ecologies of the Virtual

Interview by Alexander Burenkov

Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s practice begins in the field: months-long trips with biologists and natural history researchers, during which he records sound, collects drawings, and scans landscapes through photogrammetry. Back in the studio, this material becomes the substrate for digital ecologies built in game engines—slow, atmospheric simulations that explore how we sense and remember the natural world.

His installations often merge sculpture, spatial sound and projected or engine-driven imagery, but for Steensen the medium is always secondary to worldbuilding. Each project starts from short poems and narrative fragments he writes, which guide the design of his virtual environments before collaborators join. Whether working in VR, games, video or physical sculpture, he aims to create spaces that alter perception: shifting scale from insect to satellite, or merging physical and digital registers so tightly that the virtual feels tactile and alive.

Increasingly, Steensen pushes this duality further—either by crafting hyper-virtual environments where digital space exerts a conceptual charge, or by translating virtual objects into physical forms and sonic architectures. Across all formats, he designs intuitive, exploratory experiences that resist the fast, transactional logic of commercial game aesthetics. Instead, his worlds invite a collective, embodied encounter with ecological systems we can no longer see, or have forgotten how to perceive.

You often describe your practice in terms of worldbuilding. In a post-digital moment when platforms and engines shape what worlds look like, how do you resist or repurpose the formal grammars of commercial game aesthetics?

There are two parts to your question. First is the idea that game engines and visualization technologies don’t just represent the world but actively change how we see and shape it. I believe this is true, and it has been central to many of my works, including A Cartography of Fantasia and Primal Tourism. Both projects explore how we create “postcards”—literal or metaphorical—of the world, and then remake reality to resemble these synthetic images. I think we’re now caught in a loop where we shape the real to look like the virtual, and the virtual to match an idealized version of the real. Your second point concerns the formal grammars of commercial game aesthetics. That’s a broad territory. Some commercial games are far more avant-garde than contemporary art—Fallout 1, Xenoblade, Final Fantasy, MDK, Alan Wake. Artists are often more influenced by arthouse or indie game aesthetics than the other way around. Yet, there’s also an increasingly generic, action-driven visual language that I actively try to avoid. I want to develop a vocabulary and style of my own, rather than make meta-commentaries on gaming. At the same time, there is remarkable artistry in professional gaming culture. While much of the big industry has become formulaic, you still see extraordinary innovations—Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a recent example from a small team with a distinct art style. So gaming visual culture operates on both extremes: some of it is ahead of contemporary art, and some of it is blandly repetitive.

Your recent Open Space presentation at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, The Song Trapper, folds moving image, virtual performance and spatial sound into a single immersive environment. How did the institutional context of the Fondation shape your choices for scale, interactivity and narrative?

The space is known as “The Chapel”—it’s tall, intimate, and partially open to the outside. Because of this hybrid inside–outside architecture, I kept the interactivity minimal and leaned into a more contemplative, almost liturgical atmosphere. The space isn’t large, so I focused on creating something that feels like a small chapel: musical, solemn, and immersive.

In your installation at the Fondation Louis Vuitton you introduce an olfactory layer alongside the visuals, sound and spatial design. Why was scent important, and how did you develop the fragrance?

I collaborated with Yann Vasnier, a master perfumer at Givaudan, who already knew my work and had seen The Deep Listener in London. I only collaborate with people I genuinely connect with and already vibe, so this felt natural. We went through a long process—probably thirty samples— exchanging texts, images, and video fragments as references. I sent him microscopic images of salamander glands that produce communication oils, and we discussed seaweed molecules. He proposed adding notes of metallic rust, something electrically eroding. The final scent blends salamander pheromones, seaweed, and rusting cables. I’d love to continue working with scent; it’s an incredibly powerful sensory layer for creating immersive worlds.

In Psychosphere, your project commissioned by Cisterne in Copenhagen, you pair subterranean architecture, deep-sea research and immersive sound/CGI environments. How did the unique conditions of Cisternerne — the near-100 % humidity, potential flooding, and cave-like space — influence your thinking about digital vs. physical infrastructures of experience?

The Cisterns is 4500 square meters, and has a 17 second echo. As soon as you enter the space itself, you are in another world. Rather than hiding this world, I tried to make it part of the artwork itself. So I dyed the water black to make it reflective and appear infinite, like the deep sea. To me, there is just space, physical or virtual. Both are spaces you have to navigate. To me, there is not a huge difference between designing a video game level, and designing an installation. It is the same process for me. I actually built the entire show at Cisterns as a video game level first, to simulate the entire installation and walk through it virtually before it got realized physically. At cisterns, I particularly worked with video and sound. I would like to make more work in the future, where it is all designed and conceptualized virtually, but unfolded physically as entire worlds you move through. I think of both virtual and physical installations, as conceptual spaces your senses and mind journey through over time, to give you a kind of ritual experience. You enter, experience, then leave. During this trip, something inside you has changed and formed a memory. This memory stays with you, inside of you. I think about this a lot when I make both physical and virtual works.

You draw on underwater vent data, robotic exploration and “more-than-human perspectives” in this project. When you translate these ecological/technological registers into immersive media, how do you think that process disrupts or reinforces the logics of the post-digital era (datasets, sensors, ubiquitous capture)?

I’m not sure we live in a “post-digital” era; it feels fully digital. What’s changing is our awareness that the digital is not just visual surfaces or interactive interfaces but vast systems mapping and manipulating all forms of life. My aim is to make data feel alive—animated, emotional, and open to human interpretation. I try to propose poetic alternatives for how we might use technologies and environmental information. This is an active practice for me: learning, mastering, and redeploying digital tools and ecological data in new artistic ways, rather than commenting on them from a distance.

The title Psychosphere suggests an interior landscape (psyche) and a sphere or system. What does this hybrid term signal in the context of immersive digital ecologies—are we exploring inner minds, whole ecosystems, or something in between?

The title grew out of my conversations with philosopher and environmental writer Melanie Challenger. She introduced the idea as a way of thinking about the origins of psyche and agency rather than intelligence. We often assume evolution is driven by intelligence, understood through human language and cognition. Psyche, however, is more diffuse and vital: all species have a psyche, a kind of living drift and agency moving them through the world. A “psychosphere,” then, describes life driven by vibration, friction, encounters—matter in motion—rather than by systems of intelligence. I worked with this idea at Cisternerne: the project is designed to affect your psyche and emotions across a 4,500 m² environment where deep-sea data becomes light, sound and material texture. There is no narrative, only transformations of matter and an embodied sense of life based on matter and friction unfolding.

The project invites audiences to “surrender” to non-human perspectives. At a moment when digital identity is often flattened into profiles and algorithmic models, how do you imagine this act of surrender as a form of resistance?

I’m far more interested in using technology in performative, embodied, intuitive ways than in algorithmic or generative ones. My work is intentionally crafted and deliberate—I insist on another way of living with the digital. Many generative tools today are product-driven and goal-oriented, while art for me is a living, unpredictable process; without that unpredictability I have no desire to make work. Creating digital installations that you physically move through invites a kind of yielding—an awareness that the natural world, like the artwork, moves through you as much as you move through it. It’s a reminder that we are more than consumers of generative content, and that creativity involves complexity, time and embodied presence.

The term “slow media” has been used to describe parts of your work. How do you understand slowness in relation to the rapid, attention-economy logics of post-digital platforms?

Physical exhibition spaces allow digital art to change pace. You can slow down, zoom in, and notice things that vanish when we experience the virtual on personal devices. I build my installations to encourage this shift, which aligns with my interest in natural environments. Exhibitions create a rare context where people can linger and engage differently. The digital can hold really incredible poetry and craft which I seek to explore genuinely, and slowness is one way to reveal that.

Spatial sound and temporally evolving systems are central to your immersive pieces. Can you talk about the role of sound design in shaping visitors’ ethical or affective relationship to non-human ecologies?

Sound is the newest evolution in virtual space. It has gone from being rather fixed, to dynamic, simulated, hyper spatial and alive, similar to how we now have living virtual images in video games. In the virtual world, we have developed the technologies to make interactive imagery to a very complex degree, and sound is now able to do the same. I draw on these tools in sound, in order to make you feel immersed in something virtual, even when you are not looking at it. The echoes, physical sensations of sound and vibrations, will impact you even if you close your eyes. So they are inescapable. They also are able to let us listen to things we normally cannot hear, when edited by technology. We can suddenly hear continental movements by turning vibrations into sound. We can listen to the heartbeats of fish, and ant feet crawling across forest floors. Sound is one of the most immediate ways of sensing worlds in nature we cannot otherwise perceive, or see.

Your practice frequently stages liminal or “in-between” ecologies (wetlands, swamps, ephemeral lakes). How do such liminal spaces help you ask different questions about data, archives and digital preservation in the Anthropocene?

I’ve worked with wetlands, swamps, rivers, lakes, and saltmarshes for many years, and recently I’ve begun documenting underwater landscapes. I focus on ambiguous terrains because they open up a richer imaginative realm. We tend to force ecosystems into categories, but some places are inherently mushy—where one world bleeds into another. That ambiguity interests me because many things can be multiple things at once. It’s a liberating idea in a moment when technology is pushing us toward deterministic identities and fixed classifications. Working in these biomes allows me to create forms that resist clear definition, yet still feel tangible and real.

Working with real datasets and ecological research creates obligations around accuracy and representation. How do you balance scientific fidelity with speculative fiction and poetic license?

Kim Stanley Robinson once said that fiction can free us from our current reality, but if it becomes pure fiction, it slips into escapism. Good fiction loosens the system while still pointing to real issues. I relate to that. I always begin with real science, research, and fieldwork—very rigorously. But I look for aspects of life that are real yet abstract or difficult to grasp. For example, in Re-animated (2018), made with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Natural History Museum in New York, I worked with material about a bird that went extinct in the late 1980s. I interviewed one of the last people who saw it alive and accessed the final sound recordings of the species. This is factual—tragically so. The scientist shared a deeply emotional story about losing something he had studied for 40 years. The artwork ultimately centered on his memory of the bird, but philosophically it explored life, death, and remembrance in a digital era where we can store and replay what no longer exists. I always start with a real fact from nature and then ask how that fact shifts something within us. That is where the art lies.

Contemporary post-digital discourse often points to the political economies of platforms and engines (ownership, labor, corporate design). How conscious are you of the tools’ political economies (Unreal/Unity pipelines, cloud services, platform governance) when you choose technical solutions?

I’m very conscious of them, and they actively shape my choices. My primary tool is Unreal Engine. Despite its current commercial presence, its origins were rooted in enabling creators: when Epic Games released early titles, they also released the software behind them for free, so anyone could modify or create their own version. A creator-driven scene grew from that—I joined it as a teenager making and sharing my own Unreal maps. Epic is now a major company, but that ethos from Tim Sweeney still remains: you can use the engine for free and only pay royalties once you’ve earned over one million USD. This has allowed an entire generation of artists to access game engines for creative work. I prefer technologies with strong creator communities and open access. I even maintain my own fork of the Unreal Engine, which means I can independently run, modify, and preserve every artwork I’ve ever made. None of my works rely on external proprietary systems. Full access to the underlying code is essential to me—I want lifelong control over how my artworks function. I’m simply not a fan of closed, tightly controlled software ecosystems.

Looking forward from The Song Trapper, what new technical or conceptual experiments are you most eager to pursue — for example real-time AI systems, volumetric capture, new forms of audience agency — and why?

With The Song Trapper, I was primarily experimenting with high-end professional motion capture and performance. In my next works, I want to push my sound technologies further and begin releasing small poetic artworks as downloadable games for home use. Most importantly, I want to explore how digital tools and my worldbuilding can expand into physical realms—not just as sculptures, but as spaces. I’m interested in creating physical environments that you enter, conceived and shaped digitally but experienced only in the physical world. I’d also like to experiment with a real-time, invisible virtual artwork composed solely of sound and smell, yet capable of simulating an entire world. I’ve used AI to transform my hand-drawn sketches into virtual characters, which is interesting to a point. But I’m ultimately more compelled by the larger questions of how technologies are changing how we feel, interact, express ourselves, and connect to the natural world.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.

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