The Ephemeral Lake (2024)

Live Simulation, Generative Sound and Interactive Glass Sculpture

The Ephemeral Lake is a living instrument where life emerges and vanishes within a real-time simulated world and generative musical composition. The artwork sings and continuously transforms from environmental to inner mental worlds, and through its real-time simulation every user experience is never the same.

Originally commissioned by the Hamburger Kunsthalle as part of the anniversary birthday celebrations for Caspar David Friedrich, it was born from Steensen’s ecological fieldwork to California’s Mojave Desert during the Winter of 2023, and explores temporary bodies of water only possible via unique climatic conditions. In geology, the concept of an "ephemeral lake" is used to study aquatic ecosystems appearing a few times a century within arid landscapes. Those within the Mojave sit within a network of ancient waterway systems and The Ephemeral Lake is heavily inspired from Lake Manly specifically.

Digitally built using Steensen’s original fieldwork research (recordings, scans, photographs etc.), The Ephemeral Lake’s virtual choreography controls a generative musical composition created by experimental sound artist Okkyung Lee and composer Lugh O'Neil, continuing Steensen’s exploration into musical collaboration. This composition also influences a series of 3D printed interactive glass light sculptures; their physical form directly based on enlarged scans of a rock needle formed of tufa from the Mojave. Their light frequency consistently responds to The Ephemeral Lake’s song that is in turn influenced by its simulated world, and algorithmically sped up so audiences can experience this natural phenomenon through night and day, drought and floodplain, life and death.

PREVIEW SCENES & PERSPECTIVES

The Installation

The Ephemeral Lake is supported by multiple screens with complimenting sculptural elements, and corresponding concept sketches by Steensen. The first time presenting drawings as part of an installation, they foreground the different layers of the world and their primary connecting force or lore; water.

The screens act as portals into this ‘living’ desert environment and each of them offer a different view into the world, whilst seven physical light  sculptures emit varying patterns of light depending on the musical interplays of the virtual world.

Conceived by the artist as a ‘polyphonic instrument’, the installation explores the two antagonistic realms inherent in the natural phenomenon: above ground, we see a fleeting crystalline world composed of water reflections, crackling salt fields and arid weather conditions…beneath we dive into a labyrinth of humid limestone caves and endless water reservoirs. These contrasts compel contemplation on the unforeseen manifestations of our surroundings and invite us to rethink our own relationship to the transient and fragile ecosystems that envelop us.

All exhibition elements are interconnected and simultaneously show the exact same setting, ‘a semi-sentient environment of sound, screens and glass objects’.  As a viewer, you find yourself in the centre of this virtual ecosystem and intuitively become a part of it.

The Novascene Heart

California’s Mojave Desert was once a network of ancient lakes and rivers. At its peak during some 20,000 years ago, the Mojave River drainage basin flowed to join the now-subterranean Amargosa River, feeding a cluster of paleolakes.Today Death Valley is an arid desert, and, in summer, the hottest place on Earth. The ancient waterways are ghosts.

In The Ephemeral Lake these rare conditions are crystallized, and made accessible through its simulated cadences and virtual cavernous underworld that features virtual sculptures in real-time dialogue with physical ones.

Within its deeper realm exists The Novascene Heart, a simulated pulsating energy cradled within virtual limestone that mimics the underground caves supporting temporary reservoirs within our physical reality like the Mojave Desert.

The Ephemeral Lake Publication from Distanzverlag

Edited by Ulrich Schrauth and Elizabeth Stumpf along with publisher Distanzverlag for on The Ephemeral Lake’s catalogue features special interviews, fieldwork images, poetry and reflections. Throughout its pages are behind the scenes process, site accounts, photographed motifs, key inspirations… core ingredients allowing the evocation of The Ephemeral Lake. It also features special QR codes to exported virtual perspectives from the Lake’s various cadences and scenes, so you will always be able to access its portals long after the exhibition’s run.

Contributions include an interview between Steensen and curator Shumon Basar on film and video game based inspirations, a comparative analysis looking at the Lake versus the school of European landscape painting by Museum Director Alexander Klar, narrative except by American author Claire Vaye Watkins connecting desert based mythologies, and musically led analytical feature by musician and writer Claire L. Evans dissecting the sensitive sound qualities that were collaborative contributions by compositional musician Lugh O’Neil and experimental sound artist Okkyung Lee.

The Ephemeral Lake Credits

Artist and Creator: Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Co-Producer: Elizabeth Kircher

Curator: Ulrich Schrauth

Experimental Sound Artist: Okkyung Lee

Music Composition: Lugh O’Neill

3D Development and Design: Jakob Kudsk Steensen & Erratic Animist Studio

Technical Manager: Wouter Weynants


Installation Producer: Andrea Familari

Project Producer/Studio Management: Alex Boyes

Sponsored by: Freunde der Kunsthalle e.V., Deutsche Bank, Fürst Bismarck, Danish Arts Foundation, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung, Behörde für Kultur und Medien

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