The Digital Sensorium, The Vegetal Metaverse
Essay accompanying Berl-Berl: The Singing Swamp at ARoS Art Museum written by Aliya Say
Jakob Kudsk-Steensen’s Berl-Berl is an immersive installation: it invites us to step out of our ordinary day-to-day conception of the real, out of the lovely but amply familiar Aarhus, into the digital otherworld conceived by the artist. Berl-Berl is a song for the swamp that formed over 10,000 years ago in the area now occupied by the city of Berlin. The artist orchestrates a score for a multisensory entrance into the lost ecosystem: a 3D wetlands landscape created with the use of macro photogrammetry, collected during months of fieldwork and animated using the game creation tool Unreal Engine. The digital swamp is sonified, and thus enlivened, by the voice of experimental singer Arca interwoven with environmental sounds of local birds and amphibian creatures.
BEYOND OCULAR LOGIC
Our current epoch privileges sight and vision-derived ocular logic above other senses – yet all human experience is immersive and multisensory by its nature. To be alive is to be immersed in one’s immediate environment, to experience the world around with all available sensorial and sense-making capacities. In this, a human animal demonstrates but little superiority: plants, for example, observe and understand their environment through at least twenty senses, including five familiar to us. In an extraordinary study published in 2021, authors discover that the Boquila trifoliolata plant is capable of mimicking leaves and vines of other plants – even if those plants are plastic! The authors discuss that the mimicry may be facilitated via plant-specific ocelli – Boquila sees her neighbour – yet the workings and the processing mechanisms of plant vision and other sensorial capacities remain, for the large part, obscure. It is through ’fingeryeyes’, as gender studies scholar Eva Hayward calls them, that many creatures devoid of recognisable ocular organs sense and apprehend one another. Non-retinal vision carves spaces for kaleidoscopic multisensory immersion: an openness to the world where borders between beings, elements, and things dissolve, and the notion of a unified, autonomous self crumbles.
Meanwhile, what we humans perceive as an observable world in our normal waking consciousness is, in fact, an approximation model, a somnambulist stroll through the universes of potentiality, while remaining largely blind to their multidimensional more-than-human complexity. We do not perceive things as they are – rather, our brains use predictive coding based on past knowledge and estimates, constantly hallucinating the world into existence. How, then, can we recalibrate these long-engrained mental algorithms shaped and polished by years of conditioning – not just by direct experience, but also by the social and cultural norms and belief systems, as much as their biases? How can we not only unthink, but also unfeel these models cemented into high-speed neural pathways of the default-mode network (DMN) that channel and guide all our thought?
ECSTATIC JOURNEYING
One possibility to reboot the hard-wired patterns of thinking comes through the so-called altered states of consciousness – phantasmagoric immersive states that offer temporary dislocation from ‘baseline’ reality and may allow us to gain new perspectives and meanings. These vivid experiences are often accompanied by profound mystical insights, particularly when they take place in the context of a spiritual ceremony, a mythical dream-journey or a religious festival, such as in the traditions of indigenous cultures the world over: from Siberian shamans to Amazonian curanderos, to pagan rites and the Eleusinian mysteries of the ancient Greek world. Our ancestors had regular access to trance states in ceremonies that harnessed breath, movement, singing and artistic visioning as portals to otherworlds. These ceremonies, I’d like to argue, were both signs of, as well as largely responsible for, the profound realisation that man is neither the pinnacle nor centre of creation – a core belief in countless Indigenous ontologies. Ecstatic journeys promoted the celebration of the mystical connectedness with nature and of kinship networks that extend to animals and plants, wind and rocks, hills and swamps. For our ancestors, mythical landscapes populated by creatures, such as the water spirits or great tree of Triglav we meet in Berl-Berl, were not just fairy-tale representations of places and beings that inhabited them. Rather, they signified processes of mapping the micro- and macrocosmic relations, of tracing the landscapes they voyaged through in the waking world and those they visited in the dreamworlds.
The mythic view of consciousness in European cosmological thinking has been systematically erased over two thousand years of targeted persecution, combined with, and mirroring, the destruction of sacred landscapes and places that have given rise to magical thought in the first place. These trends have particularly accelerated with the colonial conquest of the pre-Modern and Modern era, and the concurrent rise of Western scientific epistemology, coupled with the hegemony of rational logic and economic growth agendas. The Berlin swamp devastated in the 1700s is just one acute example of these tragic developments that Kudsk-Steensen’s project uncovers.
DIGITAL (UN)REALITIES
Many contemporary artists join forces with writers, scientists, as well as with spiritual and ecological activists who draw our attention to ancient wisdom traditions and cosmological thinking of the cultures and peoples long gone, pulverised and mashed away in the relentless blender of history. Arguably, praxis of magical thinking may offer a possibility to wander away from a purely rationalised thought and its legacy of historical violence inherited through Western hegemonic ontologies and their deep-rooted connection with colonialism, anthropocentrism, and environmental destruction. Jakob’s installation is inspired by and draws from the rich well of Sorbian folklore, language, and songs – where the artist’s intention is not only to incorporate those in the work as a reference point or conceptual framework, but to use them as a foundation for new visions and imaginings, and for inspiring lost sensibilities through mytho-somatic experience of the virtual worlds that he creates.
Jakob’s digital (un)realities serve a powerful reminder that all digital art is created with and experienced through the body. From the body of an artist, prostrated upon the Earth to take hundreds of close-up photographs of every leaf and every crawling creature, through a long journey of processing historical archive imagery and field recordings; further extending the network of real-life intra-personal collaborations with researchers and technologists; adding the singer’s vibratory voice. The sprawling and growing branches of the project are all finally brought together in a museum installation: the one that the visitor drifts through – looking, listening, breathing, sighing and gasping, being distracted and getting drawn back in. Technology translates the observed world into a code, with its binary kind of logic – but we experience the digital artwork with and through the body: from zeroes and ones back to the multiverses of embodied living and breathing beings. Access to the otherworlds in the most sophisticated of installations takes place through the simplest (or at least, commonest) of all vehicles – the body.
MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS
Today, numerous tech enthusiasts and multibillion dollar corporations offer us a dream of a virtual offworld through the experience of a digital Metaverse. The promise of the Metaverse is yet another demonstration of our profound need for mythic narratives, for journeying and shapeshifting. Yet, this convulsive search for invisible realities and for meaning in the world dominated by neoliberal capital and techno-utopianism is being harnessed for profit rather than for communal transformation and renewal. It does so removed from all somatic context — without the accompanying ritual, without any sacrifice, nor critical thought, and without providing a larger contextual purpose traditionally conveyed by the religious and spiritual traditions, and today by artists such as Kudsk-Steensen: Berl-Berl’s generous offering is not distraction and entertainment, but the exploration of our connectedness to the more-than-human beings and forces, our embeddedness and dependence on our ecological home.
Senses are the meeting point for the multiple universes across species and minds. It is the profound interest in and fascination by the mythopoetic and somatic experiences that grounds Jakob’s work in the most precious technology of all – ways of sensing, and of thinking and being that stretch beyond the human. The introduction of speculative narratives that meld bodies and myths, human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, and are viewed as a spiritual, mystical and ethical project, is the artist’s way of offering a soft kind of resistance, a mindful intervention to disrupt the everyday patterns and travel backwards in time to map out novel and liveable futures.
Aliya Say