‘You Can Slow Down Time in Virtual Reality’: Why This Artist Is Using VR to Recreate Lost Ecosystems in the Era of Climate Change
The last Kaua’i ‘ō’ō bird died in 1987. After the species went extinct, a user uploaded a recording of the Hawaiian bird’s unique mating call to YouTube in 2009 and it has since been played by humans more than a half-million times since.
One of them was the Danish-born, New York-based artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, who uses Virtual Reality as a tool to remix and create a new kind of landscape that is not bound to time or space, and that recalls the irretrievable, lost nature of history.
For his recent installation RE-ANIMATED (2018-19), which was on view in the Future Generation Art Prize’s exhibition in Venice during last year’s biennale, Steensen brings the Kaua’i ‘ō’ō bird back to life via an imagined virtual-reality world.
There’s another layer of this story, which is personal, and I don’t want to go into details, but it’s about family and losses. Even though I grew up in a digital time and am used to archiving things with social-media pictures and everything, people still die and vanish and can never come back.
What about the limits of VR as a medium?
The limits of VR as medium would be the size of the audience. I have eight headsets now, and after each exhibition they just broke down because the technology is so new. All these complications can play in when dealing with a big audience.
See the full story here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jakob-kudsk-steensen-vr-1748265