Primal Tourism (2016)

Video & Multiplayer Video Game

Primal Tourism (2016) is a virtual island, where tourism, science fiction, technology and speculations on future climates merge with escapism. The core of the project is an exact and full-scale virtual replica of the iconic tourist island Bora-Bora in French Polynesia. The landscape of the Island is both primal and futuristic, as ancient eco-systems are contrasted with future and abandoned tourist resorts, and the camera shifts between movement patterns, which appear human, animal and drone-like. The shape of the Island is based on satellite maps, which have been converted into the space of the landscape. Natural scientific illustrations of the region’s future water levels and ecosystems have been combined with native primal species from Bora Bora. On the Island are also a series of more narrative locations which are based on tourists photographs shared online, on reddit, as well as drawings out of the logbook of Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch explorer, who went there on behalf of the Dutch East Indian Trading company during the 18th century. VR, climate speculations, tourism and a dream-like alluring form of landscape intertwine.

The work is exhibited as a narrative video, alongside the multiplayer video game or VR.

Primal Tourism has been shown at HEK in Basel, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, and online with Serpentine Galleries as a virtual island for shared conversations on environmental thinking and world building. The work has been exhibited at museums, festivals and in public since its inception in 2016.

Primal Tourism at Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020. © Blaise Adilon.

Primal Tourism (2016) - Walkthrough video

Primal Tourism: Walk-through
Format: Video, 22 min, 41 sec. 4K/6K
Walk-through is a term used in online communities, where individuals record, comment on and share their methods for beating computer games and the routes they take through virtual worlds. Using this visual trope as an entry point, Jakob Kudsk Steensen has developed a video, where we follow an anonymous character exploring the future abandoned island of Borabora. The camera changes between mimicking human, animal and drone like movement patterns, and the commentaries of the protagonist combines references to colonialism, escapism, and tourism.

Artist Worlds: Live Performance with Serpentine Galleries

In 2021, Primal Tourism’s virtual island was host to the livestreamed multi-player immersive event, “Artists Worlds” with Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Kay Watson, Ben Vickers, Rindon Johnson, Alenda Chang and Mikkel Rosengaard in the first Artists Worlds series at the Serpentine Galleries London.

Artist Worlds is an ongoing series of commissions and events that support artistic practices that engage with simulated realities, immersive story-telling and virtual world-building that invites audiences into these worlds to explore and offer insights into these advancing technologies and associated practices, processes and ideas.

Throughout the pandemic lockdowns, Jakob Kudsk Steensen organized artist, curator and thinker meetups in virtual VR worlds, creating multiple social sessions of 20-40 people meeting to explore, connect and express what it means to unfold art in digital realms. In March, 2021, the first formal event was organized with Serpentine Galleries, inviting poets and thinkers to participate - together in online VR multiplayer - to share stories of environmental imagination and new perspectives on relationships between virtual world making and ecological changes. The even was live, online streamed and mixed in real time. Two invisible virtual camera-men travelled around the virtual island, as the six speakers conversed and explored locations. The result was a live, online, physical and virtual event.

If you would like to host virtual and streamed talks and events on the island of Primal Tourism, please send inquiries to info@erraticanimist.com