Boreal Dreams (2025)

Live Simulation, Spatialised Sound, and Online Interactive Experience.

Boreal Dreams explores how different changes to our climate also impact changes within us, how we dream, think and sleep. Presented in two parts, a virtual world and online interactive artwork, Boreal Dreams traverses the boreal, from North America to Scandinavia, a realm of where environments are shifting and with this, so are intelligences and consciousness.

Commissioned by the Fondation Beyeler as part of the historical painting show Northern Lights curated by Helga Christoffersen and Ulf Küster, whilst Northern Lights celebrates the boreal’s historical past from national perspectives, Boreal Dreams conjures ecological futures to be considered - a hugely influential ecological region for stabilising our planet climate internationally.

Hosting approximately 40% of the world’s terrestrial carbon and natural sunlight barrier being the world’s largest forest, the boreal ensures heat and light are in balance so that our own natural cycles are maintained; heat, rest, sleep, dreams. Contributing to its fabric and ecological fieldwork, Steensen travelled to Northern Minnesota to visit the Marcell Experimental Forest that has been simulating boreal climatic futures through a series of architectural domes; each manipulating temperature and atmospheric conditions at increasing increments.

Along with collaborators, sound artist Matt McCorkle and dream scientist and writer Adam Haar, Steensen collected images, scans, recordings and data that have contributed to the virtual fabric of Boreal Dreams. So whilst the virtual world presents an abstract creative narrative to be interacted and experiences, its story is based on a physical real place.

https://borealdreams.live/

BOREAL DREAMS x CLIMATE FUTURES

Built from boreal fieldwork and in collaboration with Matt McCorkle and Adam Haar, Boreal Dreams consists of fiver different climate futures. Each at a different stage of warming, and forever impacting its ability to grow, regenerate and sleep. Within these shifts, so will our own natural cadences, our sleep, our dreams. Simulated in real time through the virtual world through sound and moving images, these stories can also be experienced individually through the interactive online experience (https://borealdreams.live/). Each expressing their own qualities and influences to our mental states as the boreal continues to morph through increased climatic temperatures; within the final chapter at +9°C, resides a special musical composition that aims to evoke the boreal in your own dreams by listing to its song as you fall asleep.

BOREAL FOREST +0°C

The Boreal Forest introduces and connects you with the Boreal at an ambient levels, its conditions are slow moving here, in cold waterlogged earth decomposition is stalled.

OUTDOOR INSTALLATION & ONLINE EXPERIENCE

Outside within the parklands of Fondation Beyeler parklands, Boreal Dreams’ virtual world exists via double sided LED screens; one side presenting the boreal through chapters +0-6.5, the other conjuring the dream realm at +9. Dispersed throughout the canopy of the surrounding trees a complimentary soundscape is spatialised to map directly only the parklands and in synchronisation with the virtual world.   

Inside the online and interactive artwork is introduced, where Steensen’s video game expertise has been applied, prompting playful exploration of Boreal Dreams’ more intimate and hidden ecological stories. It also continues ongoing application of ecological and psychological design philosophies within virtual worlds, featuring additional texts by Adam Haar that add detail to the different climatic futures, and draw attention to our psychological with light and heat that connects to ecological relationships.

The outdoor simulated piece responds to site specific qualities found at the Fondation Beyeler and is in constant cycle, no two experiences are the same. The online experience allows for Boreal Dreams’ chapters to be prompted and understood in more depth, as well as hosting a unique song found within its final chapter that when listened to as you fall asleep, seeks to conjure the boreal forest within your own dreams.

https://borealdreams.live/

Boreal Dreams installation images: Mathias Mangold, courtesy Fondation Beyeler 2025

THE BOREAL DREAM

“At +9°C, the boreal is a memory. It can only be visited in dreams. In light sleep, in incandescent sleep, in thaw and chafe and change. The 7 meters of peat below your feet now obliterated, the 11,000 years of plants held there in carbon stasis, a now memory. Those millennia have now returned, come up from earth into atmosphere. The past is present, a forest is a dream, and we are in bare reality.

Against the whole scheme of life, a wet place is burning. Releasing dormant carbon, the planet traveling back in time, to a time before the forest, and hurtling forward, to an empty future where trees are just a memory, all at once, all too fast. What was suppressed fills the room and we cannot help but breathe the carbon in.

A dream does not begin at the beginning. No satin curtain raises to start the show, we find ourselves in a story that has begun before our arrival. The waking world doesn’t really end either, remember: The 4 minutes before sleep, in which we transition to unconsciousness, is a period of profound amnesia, lost to waking memory. Nobody knows what happens in the in-between. It is a switch so subtle that we’re unaware we’ve slipped between worlds, upward not northward, and any passersby could convince us nothing ever really changed, things have always been this way.”

Text by Adam Haar, Dream Scientist and Researcher.

‘NORTHERN LIGHTS’ at FONDATION BEYELER

Complimenting the commission of Boreal Dreams by Fondation Beyeler also includes the historical paintings exhibition Northern Lights, presenting 74 landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada produced between 1888 and 1937. Among these include masterpieces by Hilma af Klint and Edvard Munch. These artists all share the boreal forest as a common source of inspiration. The seemingly boundless expanses of the forest, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights and natural phenomena such as the northern lights gave rise to a specifically Nordic form of modern painting, which to this day exerts enduring appeal and fascination.

The boreal forest, which stretches south and north of the polar circle, forming one of our planet’s largest primeval forests, was increasingly represented as a spiritual landscape. The exhibition provides an opportunity to trace the development of Nordic landscape painting in modern art through selected works by Helmi Biese, Anna Boberg, Emily Carr, Prince Eugen, Gustaf Fjæstad, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lawren S. Harris, Hilma af Klint, J. E. H. MacDonald, Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin, Harald Sohlberg and Tom Thomson.

The exhibition curated by Beyeler Fondation Senior Curator Ulf Küster in close collaboration with Helga Christoffersen, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. 

Boreal Dreams Credits

Creator and Lead Artist: Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Co-Producer: Elizabeth Kircher

Sound Artist: Matt McCorkle

Text Writer & Dream Scientist: Adam Haar

Web Developer: James Wreford

Graphic Designer: Roxy Zeiher

Installation Producer: Andrea Familari

Additional Development: Wouter Weynants


Project Producer/Studio Management: Alex Boyes

Commissioned by: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel 2025

Boreal Dreams was commissioned by the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel and supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation. The exhibition project was curated by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large & Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Project management for Boreal Dreams was handled by Iris Hasler, Associate Curator, Fondation Beyeler.

Boreal Dreams was developed in collaboration with and with the scientific support of the Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service.

Special thanks to Researchers Stephen Sebestyen and Nancy Glenn.

For press inquiries or exhibition bookings:
info@erraticanimist.com