Reviving Extinct Species in Virtual Reality: The Eco-Technological Artworks of Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Guest Chair and Respondent, Dr Amanda Rees (University of York)

In this talk, Sarah Bezan explores what it means to revive an extinct species through virtual reality (VR) technologies. Focusing on the eco-technological artwork of Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, she argues that his VR films Re-Animated (2018-2019) and Re-Wildling (2018) expand the emotional register of extinction beyond mourning and melancholia to include ecological emotions like sublimity and bewilderment. In Re-Animated, Steensen stages a distinctly sublime virtual encounter with the Hawaiian 'ō'ō bird (declared extinct in the late 1980s). Recreating the last 'ō'ō bird call as a floating 3D sonic object that viewers can encounter within the VR space, Steensen’s work exemplifies what Bezan calls the 'species revivalist sublime': an affective experience that takes VR viewers into a space of reflection upon the sublimity of biotechnological potentials. Likewise, Re-Wildling incites feelings of bewilderment in viewers as it explores the eerie absence of the Hawaiian crow, or 'alalā (declared Extinct in the Wild in 2002). Guided by an aqueous floating orb - a spiritual portrayal of the crow as an ancestral deity - viewers are led to grieve the lost 'alalā but also to pursue the lost 'alalā, and to become lost in that pursuit. In meeting head-on with the disorienting perplexity of what it means to be Extinct in the Wild (to be lost, out of place), viewers of Re-Wildling experience bewilderment as a cognitive and affective condition of unmooring; a shift of coordinates in the wake of extinction. By stimulating alternative ecological emotions like sublimity and bewilderment, Steensen’s digital artwork outlines a new set of values for the future aesthetics of extinct species.

Sarah Bezan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English & Related Literature and the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity. Her research examines the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary British and settler colonial literature and digital media/arts. She is the author of Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture (under advance contract with Manchester University Press) along with several articles in Parallax, Configurations: Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, and Mosaic, among others. Twitter @sarahbezan  |  sarahbezan.com

Amanda Rees is  a historian of science at the University of York who has worked widely on the field of human/animal relations and on the history of the human, and more-than-human future. Her most recent book, with Charlotte Sleigh, is Human, published by Reaktion Press, and she is currently working on a history of aliens in science. 

Please join us in person in the Treehouse or via the Zoom link.