RE-ANIMATED

Re-Animated is a virtual reality and video installation by Jakob Kudsk Steensen that investigates relationships between extinction, preservation, and immortality.

It is a virtual ecosystem based on 3D scans of real plant and animal specimen from The American Museum of Natural History (NYC), audio recordings of the recently-extinct Kauai O’o bird’s song from Cornell University’s Department of Ornithology, and interviews with ornithologist Douglas H. Pratt about his memories of the lost creature. Steensen has converted the source material into a new world that mixes primal habitats with emerging ecological realities.

Re-Animated delves into unpredictable causalities across two centuries that lead to the extinction of the song bird Kauai O’o. In the early 1800s, a ship ferrying horses across the ocean arrived on Kauai, bringing with it avian malaria. 100 years later in the early 1990s, a series of hurricanes sweeping across Kauai’s Alakai plateau forced the Kauai O’o to take refuge in the lowlands, where the mosquito roamed. A person’s actions in 1800 had untold consequences for the entire of the species a century later, and the Kauai O’o is now lost.

The virtual world of Re-Animated comes to life with interactive audio including algorithmic music composed by Michael Riesman, Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble, as well as environmental audio effects that connect to the digital landscape. Plants, moss, and insects respond to the pulse of music generated in real-time, resulting in a unique VR experience for every individual user. In Re-Animated, everything is slowed down, and the audience is invited on an journey that explores emotions tied to memories of past natures, and imagined futures, as it immerses into Steensen’s distinctively designed environment.

Re-Animated is an energetic collective attempt at inspiring radically new visceral imaginations of how our lives are connected to natural historic material and future technologies. The project questions the extent to which natural history archives and ideas about an authentic natural past should influence how we imagine and build future worlds, which may become unbound by physical conditions governing our organic reality. As an installation, Re-Animated seamlessly merges the space of Tranen Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, where the project will premiere in November 2018, with a vast digital ecosystem, developed by the artist and a community of experiential developers (please see below). In the installation, three monitors and three VR headsets are connected to a large metal skeleton that fills the exhibition space. While exploring the installation – which invites the audience to walk in-and out-of virtual reality, around videos, and across a physical landscape composed of computers, dirt, and the metal skeleton.

The work was developed by Jakob Kudsk Steensen over the course of an entire year, with the aim of slowing down, contemplating, and removing himself from a method of producing digital art that often involves short deadlines, quick mashups, and spectacular effects.

Steensen’s research and artistic practice is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. In order to develop his projects, he ventures on intense photographic excursions and then converts the collected material into digital worlds with 3D scanners, photogrammetry, satellite data, and computer game software. Inspired by ecology-oriented science fiction and conversations with biologists and ethnographers, Steensen’s projects are ultimately virtual simulations populated by mythical beings existing in radical ecological scenarios.

Re-Animated will be on view at the Tranen Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen, Denmark from 8 Nov 2018 – 14 Feb 2019. Further information via the link below.

Creators and producers: Jakob Kudsk Steensen (director, producer and lead artist), Michael Riesman (Composer and Music Director), Jerry Smith (Music Programmer)Toke Lykkeberg Nilsen and Tranen (co-producers), Todd Bryant (audio interaction), Andy Thomas (bird call fluid simulation), Jeremy Thompson (character optimization), Michael Silberblatt (narration), 2Nstudio (associate producer), Jazia Hammoud (research + project management)