Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent the last decade doing something unusual: treating the video game engine as a medium for ecological fieldwork. His immersive installations grow from years of on-site research—underwater volcanic vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, experimental forests in Minnesota—transformed into virtual worlds that sit somewhere between scientific document and living dream.
In this conversation, we'll trace the arc of that practice through Otherworlds, Steensen's survey exhibition at Centre PHI in Montréal, which gathers five installations across five distinct spaces and spans roughly 15 years of work.
We'll get into Psychosphere in particular—a virtual world built from photogrammetry of newly discovered submarine volcanic landscapes, where fossils and living species and unknown life forms coexist in a space that is neither documentary nor fiction.
And we'll talk about The Song Trapper, his recent commission for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which introduces the first character in an expanding video game world called Evoker—a mute figure who collects vanishing sounds and carries them across ecosystems. What does it mean to use game technology not to simulate play, but to preserve ecologies? How do you build a world that holds both scientific observation and imagination without flattening either? Join me!