BOREAL DREAMS
(2025)
LIVE SIMULATION, SPATIALIZED SOUND & ONLINE INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE
How do shifts in the climate affect our dreams? Some answers lie in the world’s largest primeval forest, the boreal, which regulates the climate through its vast sunlight barrier and carbon storage qualities and in turn keeps our own natural cycles in balance. In recent years the boreal has become the fastest changing climate zone on the planet. Boreal Dreams is a reflection on how these changes directly impact how we dream, think and sleep.
Presented in two parts, a visceral live simulation show on screens with spatial sound as well as an interactive online experience, Boreal Dreams forms a portal to possible climate futures and opens up a connection to our consciousness that is tied to the natural environment. The experience feels dreamlike and speculative while being modeled on an actual site, the Marcell Experimental Forest in Northern Minnesota. Before the dismantling of the site in 2025, this long-term research unit simulated distinct future climate scenarios of the boreal zone. Boreal Dreams takes viewers on a journey through five of the chambers, in which temperature and atmospheric conditions are manipulated at increasing increments from zero to plus nine degrees celcius. This gradual shift heightens our sensory awareness to the subtle yet escalating effects of global warming.
↗ Explore the Interactive Online Experience
Boreal Dreams pioneers how an art-historical exhibition can address contemporary urgencies and global audiences and operates both as an extension of the exhibition into digital space and into the future.
- Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large & Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Over the summer of 2024, Kudsk Steensen stayed at the Marcell Experimental Forest site to collect images, scans, recordings and data to create the virtual and sonic fabric of Boreal Dreams. The work’s multi-layered soundscape was designed by sound artist Matt McCorkle to evoke encounters with forests in a dream state. Dream scientist and writer Adam Haar contributed five distinct stories for each chapter that look at how each climate scenario will alter our dream cycles. While the two-channel live installation takes audiences on a speculative journey into the future of the boreal forest, the online world allows visitors across the world to explore soils, foliage and sounds of the changing forest and the eco-fiction embedded within at their own pace.
Commissioned by Fondation Beyeler and Buffalo AKG for the exhibition Northern Lights (26 January – 25 May 2025), Boreal Dreams offers a contemporary counterpart to the exhibition's presentation of historical encounters with the boreal world by Scandinavian painters such as Hilma af Klint and Edvard Munch. Originating in Kudsk Steensen’s interest in how historical landscape paintings continue to inspire world-building within the gaming industry, the artist in turn used gaming technologies to create a digital environment modeled on the Marcell Experimental Forest’s climate simulation, making the impact the climate shift in the boreal zone has on our sleep and dream patterns palpable.
EXHIBITIONS
Fondation Beyeler
Riehen, Switzerland
Jan 26 — May 25, 2025
Double-sided LED screens, spatialized soundscape.
Exhibited within Fondation Beyeler’s parklands, Riehen, Switzerland.
Read more at fondationbeyeler.ch
Tribeca Immersive 2025: In Search of Us
Tribeca Film Festival, New York City, USA.
Jun 4 — Jun 15, 2025.
Selected immersive installations.
The Immersive Programme was presented in partnership with Onassis ONX & Agog: The Immersive Media Institute.
Read more at onx.studio
Northern Lights at Fondation Beyeler
Jan 26 — May 25, 2025
Curated by Ulf Küster, Beyeler Fondation in close collaboration with Helga Christoffersen, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Selected installations shown among 74 landscape artists from Scandinavia and Canada.
Exhibited in the Parklands of Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland.
Read more at fondationbeyeler.ch
“From the outset, Kudsk Steensen has been experimenting with gaming software and technology and makes use of virtual world-building tools to merge physical and virtual reality, thereby demonstrating how video games enable us to develop a greater sensibility toward the world around us. The natural world influences us in a deeply psychological way, and in his work Kudsk Steensen asks how we can then expand our perceptions of nature using technology.”
- Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large & Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
CREDITS
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Boreal Dreams, 2025.
Live simulation, spatialized sound & online interactive experience.
Commissioned by the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel and supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation.
Developed with the scientific support of the Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service.
Special thanks to Researchers Stephen Sebestyen and Nancy Glenn.
Artist and Creator — 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
Project management — Iris Hasler, Associate Curator, Fondation Beyeler
PHOTOGRAPHY
STILLS
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Boreal Dreams (still), 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
INSTALLATIONS
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Boreal Dreams, 2025. Installation view, Tribeca, USA, 2025. Photo: Mikhail Mishin.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Boreal Dreams, 2025. Installation view, Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, 2025. Photo: Mathias Mangold, courtesy Fondation Beyeler 2025.