What does the beginning of life sound like as it emerged in volcanic vents in the deep sea billions of years ago? Jakob Kudsk Steensen has created a deeply poetic and transformative soundscape echoing past and future in the fluid, underground veins and dark chambers of Cisternerne. Merging field recordings with musical compositions Steensen invites the audience into a speculative realm of our animate world, where sound installations become an evocative spatial organ of interconnectedness.
In this interview I got the chance to ask him about the concept of Psychosphere and how soundwork plays a central role in telling stories where matter, movement and psyche intertwine into emotional landscapes. I still can’t escape the fact that the spoken word originated in the sea and that a fishbone is what allows us to sing.
P/A: With “Psychosphere” you invite the audience into a virtual world of underwater volcanic landscapes, where sound, video and light together create a synesthetic consciousness in the long, humid tunnels of the Cisterns under the Søndermarken mantle. The term “psychosphere”, which gives the exhibition its name, comes from the science writer Melanie Challenger. What does that term cover and how have you approached it artistically?
Jakob Kudsk Steensen: “Psychosphere refers to the origin of agency and psyche in species, and instead of thinking about ecosystems, Melanie Challenger works with concepts of spheres. As in atmosphere, a place where different life forms have their agencies responding to each other. The core of this thinking is to study life, not in terms of systems or intelligence based on human language, but in terms of behavior and movement between species. When I go diving, and I see a fish, it is often acutely aware of me, staring back when I look at it. A mouse might do the same when you look at it. Some kind of agency, of intention, is going on.
Melanie Challenger is a good friend of mine, and we have talked about this project for a few years. My interest in working with her in relation to the deep sea, is that psychospheres develop from friction, matter, energy exchanges, in the deep sea. When you think about life this way, then how we feel and our psyche, is connected to strong environmental energies and frictions, rather than thought first.
When I create artworks like this, I wholly embrace a philosophy and scientific world beyond my own. I design everything in the work to fit the study and thinking of the person I collaborate with. In the case of Challenger, this means I had to make a work, where the sound, light, glass sculptures and videos created a sense of transmutational friction, which in return impact your psyche and inner emotional landscapes. Nothing more, nothing less. No words or rational language could be allowed inside the experience, because it would be counterintuitive to the idea of agency in life originating from matter and energetic friction in the deep sea.”
“I think of my work as living spatial instruments, rhythms and cadences you enter”
Video still
P/A: The sound seems to be a particularly important element for the story, and it can almost seem as if the soundscape is its own mutating narrator consisting of many different components and positions. How is the sound created?
JKS: “All of my installations and artworks have sound as central elements. This is something that started with my collaboration with the musical director of Phillip Glass Ensemble, Michael Riesman on my artwork, Re-animated, in 2018. I think of my work as living spatial instruments, rhythms and cadences you enter. Often, sound is controlled by the virtual landscapes, and in return, the sound changes light in the space. For Psychosphere, I collaborated with composer Lugh O’ Neil, who I have worked with several times before.
The sound is composed of many elements: My own recordings of underwater volcanoes that I created diving into one of four known locations, where you can dive into the top of an underwater volcano at human depths. Normally, they exist many kilometers under the sea, but there is a place outside of the island of Panaera, where you can dive into the top of an underwater vent at just 25 meters. My own recordings also include my breathing underwater, which sometimes play in the work, but it is mainly the volcanic bubbles that are present from my recordings.
Another sound dimension comes from the Aurora deep sea research vessel from Trondheim university, that I collaborated with, as it recorded a newly found underwater volcano in the Barents Sea summer 2024.The biggest sound library came from the ocean and culture program called TBA21, which I worked with. They have sounds of whales, fish heartbeats, underwater volcanoes, recorded over several years.
“Field recordings, both sonically and visually, are ways of registering unique textures of life and the world that we can experience.”
Music was created by Lugh O’Neil, but another main musical component is the accordion of Danish accordion player Bjarke Mogensen. The accordion was originally invented as a machine that can recreate breath mechanically. Mogensen played his own interpretive materials, as well as O’Neils own compositions. Throughout the work, the artwork gives a feeling from being made of pure vibrations, to other life forms, and then something purely man made and clearly musical.”
Photo: David Stjernholm / @david_stjernholm
P/A: Field recording is a central part of your method – perhaps a way to notice details, to become able to listen, to learn another language that is not human? At the same time, field recording is precisely a synthesis of place and technology, a simulation of something living. Or what does field recording contain in terms of possibilities and ambivalence for you?
JKS: “Field recordings, both sonically and visually, are ways of registering unique textures of life and the world that we can experience. I deeply believe that when we engage with the world, entering it over extended periods of time, rather than remaining in a space of pure culture and language, then we encounter things we may never have imagined existed in the world. Without field recording I also have no inspiration.
“I am drawn to slow, embodied and imaginative processes, where my own body and emotions go on a journey.”
I cannot get ideas sitting in my studio and thinking about exhibitions as the end goal. It feels hollow or too synthetic to me, created from realms of language and culture. I try to find sensibilities or perspectives on the world that can only be created if I go into terrains and places I have not been before. Field recording also creates a contrast to the purely technological, which, with generative technologies today, can create immediate results.
I am drawn to slow, embodied and imaginative processes, where my own body and emotions go on a journey. I draw on these memories to express myself in the final artworks. So to me, the field recording process is not only about listening to places and life beyond our human worlds, it is also an ideologically different approach to emphasizing lived processes over final outcome only.”
P/A: It was almost an occult experience to move along the pools in the subterranean, for I had a feeling of being witnessed, sung to by this choir between species. But there was also a silence in the many-voiced language, a silence that is perhaps that of the deep sea?
JKS: “Silence is important to sound. A beat is equally about what you hear, and the pauses that exist when nothing plays. For Psychosphere, the silence is inspired by how communication often appears in the deep sea. Among whales for example, which sends clicks to each other over hundreds of miles, echo is very important. And the duration between clicks is key to their language. It is not only about what you hear, but when silence occurs. It is also to deal with saturation of sound.
The Cisterns has a 17 second echo, and sound quickly shoots around and layers into an uncomfortable muddied field. So with Lugh, we discussed this a lot, creating multiple layers of sound that appear in the entire space across its 4500 square meters, pr. chamber (there are 3 chambers), or really close to you. So we made a kind of spatial instrument, where some sounds are loud and heard echoing through the space, others close to you. We have to have moments of silence because otherwise, you also cannot hear the echoes. And echo is how whales communicate in the deep.”
“Our hyoid bone, inside of our throat, is part of what allows us to sing and form complex words. This bone originated in a fish 375 millions of years ago.”
Photo: David Stjernholm / @david_stjernholm
P/A: In your poem “Psychosphere, 2025” that occurs in the exhibition text a line reads: “You are a fish who learned language – / To turn sound into code / Code into song // And the songs rewrote the fabric of reality”. What does that mean to you?
JKS: “In the theory of abiogenesis, connected to the idea of psychospheres, life originates from non-organic materials in the deep sea. Our hyoid bone, inside of our throat, is part of what allows us to sing and form complex words. This bone originated in a fish 375 millions of years ago. In this sense, the spoken word originated in the sea, and now, it is changing it.
Our language has turned into code and the same technologies, which we now use to explore the deep sea. Our language is code today that literally can change the fabrics of life through DNA modifications etc.
I write these texts and ideas for all of my artworks, to develop a kind of design framework, ideas that I can use to create my exhibitions around.”
P/A: Would you like to say a little about what kind of performance you will be doing together with Lyra Pramuk in November?
JKS: “I am so excited about this. Lyra Pramuk will perform inside of Psychosphere, entering a modified sound scape of the artwork created with Lugh O’Neil. Her performance and song is inspired by a drawing I made of a kind of mutational mermaid, a deep sea technological amorphous being. Lyra is known for her vocal manipulations through technology, and her song will echo through space, mixing with the existing soundscape of Psychosphere. I often invite artists like this to perform inside of my works, in the past with Arca, Okkyung Lee and Pan Daijing. It gives the work a lot of energy by having these unique, relatively improvised, encounters.”
Info: Lyra Pramuk will perform in Cisternerne as part of Psychosphere on November 23.More info here.
