Underground Clash (working title)
Past sub-arctic ecosystems meet future landscapes underground in Oulu.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is creating a living, immersive world beneath Oulu city centre, where memories of past local landscapes converge with the de-extinction seed vault of the Oulu Botanical Garden.
What is it about?
Part of the Autumn 2026 Lumo Art & Tech Festival, Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen creates artworks exploring how changes to our physical world impact our inner mental ones, including memories linked to shifting and changing environments. For Oulu2026, Steensen is creating a unique living virtual world with direct links to Finnish ecology and history. This simulated virtual world will focus on vanishing sub-arctic ecosystems, the conservation practices of tar, and the de-extinction floral seed vault at Oulu Botanical Garden. The subarctic where Oulu is located is one of the fastest-changing environments in the world.
Presented deep beneath Oulu city centre in Kivisydän, a cavernous space behind massive blast doors, the artwork mirrors the seed vault beneath the Oulu Botanical Garden, tar that preserves against decay. The virtual world’s supporting installation design includes interactive light and real-time spatialised sound that promises a poetic, rhythmic, and sensory journey across memories of past landscapes and imaginations of future ones. Responding to this unique subterranean site, the artwork also reinforces connections between protective shelters for human and plant futures, creating conceptual links between Kivisydän and the seed vault of the Oulu Botanical Garden.
Story of the artwork
When creating artworks, Steensen collaborates with local scientists and artists, and travels to environments to gather recordings, scans and images that become building blocks to make virtual worlds. The virtual always being intrinsically linked to the physical. For Oulu 2026, Steensen’s ecological fieldwork already spans Finnish river pathways, floral trails, and melting bogs that surround and connect Oulu. The history of tar practices, with their preservative properties and high-energy density, forms an integral part of the artwork’s composition.
Supported by video game technology and applying Steensen’s longstanding expertise building immersive experience, the work will behave like a living organism, simulated in real-time so single experience of it won’t be the same. Sounds of local landscapes intertwine with musical collaborations and voices from the region, suggesting a deep connection between human expression — the songs, words, and codes we use to interpret the world — and the ways they transform it. As our language and memories of nature evolve, so does its ecological reality.
The Artist
Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b. 1987, Denmark) is an artist working with virtual storytelling through 3D animation, spatial sound, and immersive installations. He creates poetic interpretations of overlooked natural phenomena through collaborations with field biologists, composers, scientists, and writers, constructed through extensive fieldwork. Key collaborators include singer ARCA, musical director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, Michael Riesman, and the South Korean band BTS, as part of the presentation of Catharsis at the Serpentine Galleries.
Jakob has exhibited Boreal Dreams at Fondation Beyeler, Liminal Lands at Luma Arles, Berl-Berl at Halle am Berghain in Berlin, and at the ARoS Museum of Art in Aarhus, among other projects. Still is also the 2025 selection commission for the subterranean contemporary at space Cisternene, in Copenhagen.
Kudsk Steensen has worked with video game technologies as his artistic medium for 10 years, exclusively creating new perspectives on natural environments through them. The artwork he is creating for Oulu2026 is technically built as a video game simulation, made from sounds and digitized local species from the botanical garden and the landscapes surrounding the city. As Oulu has a history of innovating communication technologies, the artwork draws on this history by creating a futuristic digital system for sensing future ecologies.
Project team
Andrea Familari (IT) – Technical Producer
Liz Kircher (USA) – Co-Producer
Alexander Boyes (AUS) – Project Producer/Studio Management
Wouter Weynants (BEL) – Lead Technical Developer
