The Deep Listener (2019) is an audio-visual ecological expedition through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, the area surrounding the Serpentine Galleries. Designed as an augmented reality and spatial audio work downloadable as an app for mobile devices, it is both a site-specific public artwork and a digital archive of species that live within the park. It pushes the utility of augmented reality and technological tools to transform our spatial understanding of the natural world. The commission expands upon Kudsk Steensen’s practice of merging the organic, ecological, and technological in the building of complex worlds in order to tell stories about our current environmental reality. Using tools and platforms from a range of fields including video games, computer generated images, and film and inspired by ecological science-fiction and scientific research, Kudsk Steensen creates a form of ‘slow media’ that uses the technological to foster attention rather than distraction. Selected as the first Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and Sir David Adjaye OBE RA. Kudsk Steensen responded to the global open call for new forms of architecture by examining the systems and infrastructure of the park and its species, and the legacy of human impact across time. At the core of the work is the London plane tree, a hybrid of two sycamore and plane trees from different sides of the world that functions, as Kudsk Steensen states, as ‘an early form of bio-architecture.’ Planted liberally throughout London during the Industrial Revolution, the tree can withstand extremely polluted conditions and the bark absorbs pollutants to protect the tree itself and clean the air we breathe which is then regularly shed. The bark becomes an archive and historical document of particles and pollution that connects our bodies to the species that cohabit the park.

Links: https://augmentedarchitecture.org/

Serpentine Augmented Architecture in collaboration with: Google Arts & Culture and Sir David Adjaye OBE RA
Sound artist: Matthew McCorkle
With support from: Bloomberg Philanthropies, AECOM, Weil, Arts Council England

Jakob Kudsk Steensen (DK) is an artist working with environmental storytelling through 3d animation, sound and immersive installations. He creates poetic interpretations about overlooked natural phenomena through collaborations with field biologists, composers, and writers. Projects are based on extensive fieldwork. Key collaborators include composer Michael Riesman, ornithologist Dr. Douglas H. Pratt, architect Sir David Adjaye OBE RA, BTS, Arca, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Natural History Museum London, among others.He was the inaugural recipient of the Serpentine Galleries’ Augmented Architecture Commission. Kudsk Steensen was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, for his work  RE-ANIMATED (2018-2019) in Kiev and the 2019 Venice biennale.