CURA.

JKS: AI is built on prescribed systems: you feed it, it learns, and enforces its logic. In the frame of Liminal Lands, commissioned by LUMA Arles in 2020, I inserted my body into the landscape to challenge such computational systems. I 3D-scanned a glacial cave with cameras by moving my body throughout it. In the studio, software trained on machine learning transformed the 1800 images I shot into full 3D. The result is fed on images outside of technological or even art realms, as another physical rhythm has been put forward.

JKS: With Liminal Lands, I discovered a lot of the wetlands we have in Europe—which give us fresh water and avoid droughts—stem from past glaciers. When scanning the cave, I noticed a particular lichen shares its name with the glacier’s and the region’s ones. I then merged languages and landscapes with technology, creating a virtual environment where these names, words, and codes interact. In Berl-Berl: The Singing Swamp, currently on view at ARoS Museum of Art, Denmark, I expand on words and lost mythologies. I produced a digital living landscape with musician and artist ARCA singing and interpreting folklore used in the past to describe the region, its rivers, mud, and water. As Melanie Challenger suggests in On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature, giving names to beings is a way to acknowledge and safeguard them.

JKS: I investigate how video games enable us to develop a sensibility of the environment. Natural spaces influence us in a deep psychological way. How, then, to expand our perceptions through technology? By way of an example, researchers have noticed sperm-whales are not only able to use echolocation to memorize entire regions but also to communicate through space. As humans, we might actually do it with video games, whose potentials are largely underrated.

JKS: I have been working in the game industry for many years prior to turning to art. It is a rigid system where it is hard to create something allowing you to explore beyond. Nonetheless, Death Stranding has for instance a very different sensibility compared to what games normally have. Perhaps our culture can do something at a different scale. There is a new generation of artists evolving on a different use of technologies and networks.

JKS: I am actually excited to see young artists adopting video games as their lingo. I admire a few artists featured in your show. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley explicitly deals with politics in a confrontational exchange with the audience. There is also Keiken, who adopt a morphing way of collaborating and playing with non-hierarchical worlds. There is not a singular way of using games as an art form. As for your question, I am intrigued by strengthening audience’s ability to perceive environmental spaces and to experience synesthesia through gaming. In exploring alternative forms of collaborations and sensibilities I take the cue from novels, as writing is the strongest virtual tool we have. One can imagine something, write it down, and thousand years later a person is entering another’s mind, building spaces and tuning emotions to their own code.

JKS: I would suggest Origins. How the Earth Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell. But also Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. As for novels, I have recently been reading a lot of China Miéville. He creates fictional worlds about class, imagination, and conformity, inviting the reader to consider the world as an animated entity. In Kraken, he stages outcasts in London. He reanimates and turns them into gods and mythological beings who live a parallel life in unexplored suburban places. Miéville’s words can be extremely pervasive, as much as I would like video gaming to be. One can close their eyes and sense the whole story in their mind.

JKS: Playing video games is like reading a novel: one really enters a deeper psychological level. With my new project, I attempt to reach for overlooked environments and turn them into songs on our conflicting origins. A human narrative coexists with strange creatures from worlds beyond the familiar, as in books by Jeff VanderMeer or N.K. Jemisin. When working on an exhibition, one has to open to environments to be linked together via different tiers of experience. I do so by collaborating with young artists as well as with senior professionals in the game industry, fostering different dialogues, rhythms, and sensibilities to connect to the environment again.

JKS: Designed as an augmented reality and spatial audio work downloadable as an app for mobile devices, The Deep Listener allowed us to experience sounds of nature at a different scale, emphasizing spatiality in a way that no other medium can. One could wander in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park and unlock ones’ senses to listen to plane trees, bats, parakeets, azure blue damselflies and reedbeds in an unexpected physical expedition.

JKS: Yes. We created a virtual forest by combining multiple different North American trees and recording different winds, rivers, and species with the sound artist McCorkle. It seems like a single shot through the forest from morning to dawn when in fact every different element in the forest—the weather, the wind, the water, the rain, the sun—play at a different pace. Suddenly millions of people watched the video online and thousands of people joined us to the gallery. We played with an erratic and chaotic approach and reached unusual audiences.

JKS: We are living in a time where we are trying to bring back extinct species, in a whole de-extinction movement coming out of anxiety of nature decay. Ted Chiang asserts we are moving into a future where technology is going to make memories of what we have lost more objective. In RE-ANIMATED, which is a video and VR work that meditates on our paradoxical techno-scientific trajectory, I deal with extinction but above all with the acceptance of vanishing lives into cosmic dust.

JKS: Coming from digital art, I would suggest to never expect a given system to be fixed in time. If you are working with a peripheral or unaccepted format, look at it from a unique perspective. Embrace it and build upon it rather than try to adapt it to an existing format.

JKS: I bring together collaborators with overlooked perspectives on ecosystems. They might be allowed to share just one perspective through official channels. I pull singers, video game developers, other professionals together to create something outside the accepted codes. The ultimate challenge is trying to instigate a structure for making something not yet imagined. The best way of doing this is to create a different space with different participants in it. It is my job as an artist to find ways to connect each other. Once you do that, you can achieve something beyond your own imagination.

HUO: Thank you, Jakob.