How Can VR Bring Us Closer To Nature?

Jakob Kudsk Steensen: The Danish artist leverages virtual reality technologies to reorient our relationship with the natural world. We take a deep dive into Berl-Berl, his ode to wetland ecosystems, now on view at Berlin’s Halle am Berghain

- TF Chan

On the day of our video call, Jakob Kudsk Steensen is in the midst of an expedition in the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve, a wetland area in the German state of Brandenburg. It is teeming with life and removed from civilisation (he’s had to drive to a nearby small town to get reception). He and his team are at the reserve for a few weeks to study the landscape, paddling around in canoes and wielding underwater cameras, microphones and hydrophones ‘to document all this life that lives between the soil and the forest’. The work is methodological and meticulous – perhaps de rigueur for an environmental biologist, but highly unusual for an artist. Of course, many artists go to great lengths to acquire insight into their subject. But few have made extensive fieldwork such an integral part of their practice, and fewer still have done so in the service of digital art.

‘I like to dive as deep as I can in my craft,’ explains Kudsk Steensen. ‘To create digital textures the way I do for a rock, I need to take 200 photos just of that rock, look at them, analyse them, and modify them.’

This immersive approach to art-making began with A Cartography of Fantasia (2015), a video installation for which Kudsk Steensen spent two months driving around Murcia to document the afterlife of Spain’s deserted resorts, the legacy of reckless financial speculation. ‘When you move through an environment, you start perceiving movement, time and scale in new ways. And because you’re experiencing it in new ways, you also start imagining new kinds of emotions or landscapes or places in your head,’ he says.