Jakob Kudsk Steensen begins many of his digital worlds far away from the computer.
His fieldwork has taken him to environments including a collapsed Swiss ice cave, experimental forests in Minnesota, volcanic seafloors around the Azores, Bora Bora and abandoned tourist landscapes.
Those places are recorded using techniques including photogrammetry, environmental data gathering, sound recording and collaboration with scientists. The material then becomes the basis for virtual environments, spatial sound and immersive moving-image installations.
Otherworlds, at PHI in Montréal until 13 September 2026, brings together six of these worlds from roughly a decade of work. It includes the North American premiere of Psychosphere, where video from geothermal and deep-sea environments meets spatial sound, interactive light and sculptural forms.
What interests me is the direction of travel.
Digital world-building is often associated with inventing environments that never existed.
Steensen does something more complicated.
He begins with places that exist intensely enough to be measured, photographed and scientifically observed, then reconstructs them digitally until documentation turns into speculation.
The resulting world is neither nature nor simulation.
It contains traces of both.
That makes the computer less like an escape from the physical environment and more like a strange ecological memory device.
A forest can become data.
Data can become an imaginary forest.
And the imaginary forest may make us notice what was disappearing from the real one.
https://phi.ca/en/events/jakob-kudsk-steensen-otherworlds/
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