The Song Trapper explores humanity's oldest navigation technologies: Voice, song, and story through digital technologies. Commissioned by Fondation Louis Vuitton for its Open Space Programme, it marks the first time Jakob Kudsk Steensen works with virtual performance and motion capture, embedding human movement as means of communication into his virtual worlds.

The video follows two mythical figures as they travel across deserts, swamps and marshes in search of traces of sounds. Nökken, a water spirit from Scandinavian folklore, once believed to guide humans through swamps with its songs, embodies ecological memory and lost oral traditions. Its counterpart, the voiceless Song Trapper, is born from advanced technologies and driven by the urge to collect data, in the form of songs and stories to make sense of its surroundings and itself.  

When the two characters meet, they enter a dance that epitomizes the philosophical tensions of our technological moment. The Song Trapper attempts to imitate Nökken’s singing, but fails for lack of its own voice, while Nökken continues without audience and purpose and represents the loss of organic knowledge, intuition and collective memory. Both characters seem restless and trapped, as they carry an inherent self-conflict about their place in a changing world.

A free-verse poem by the artist, which appears as subtitles, forms the underlying narrative of the work, shaping visual and sonic transformations. It also functioned as a creative script for the motion capture performer Iris Thomsen, who created a realtime choreography to craft the movement of the virtual characters. The poem further guided the collaboration with vocalist Lyra Pramuk, whose layered vocals form an echo the Song Trapper chases.

The work unfolds across several video game worlds created by the artist from years of environmental fieldwork, transforming scans of organisms and entire landscapes into virtual worlds. The digital characters originate in ink and watercolor drawings by Kudsk Steensen, which were translated into 3D forms through generative technologies and animated by motion capture, heightening the tension between generated and handcrafted experiences.

The exhibition extends the virtual world with soft green light, reminiscent of swamp waters, a custom-made scent by Yann Vasnier, composed of notes of seaweed, metallic rust, and salamander pheromone, and spatial sound mixed from field recordings by longtime collaborator Matt McCorkle.