The Deep Listener

The Deep Listener by Jakob Kudsk Steensen is an audio-visual ecological expedition through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, the area surrounding the Serpentine Galleries. Designed as an augmented reality and spatial audio work downloadable as an app for mobile devices, it is both a site specific public artwork and a digital archive of species that live within the park. The Deep Listener invites you to be guided on a journey to both see and hear the sights and sounds of five of London’s species: London Plane Trees, Bats, Parakeets, Azure Blue Damselflies and Reedbeds. 

Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist based in New York concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. Kudsk Steensen’s practice of developing digital worlds proposes new possibilities for storytelling through embedded field work and an interdisciplinary engagement with emerging technologies – all seen in the light of our current environment emergency.

Commissioned by Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and Sir David Adjaye OBE, 2019

App production and development by the Serpentine Galleries with:
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Artist, art director and developer
Ivaylo Getov, Technical director
Kay Watson, Curator and senior producer
Troy Duguid, Unreal developer
Cecilia Serafini, UI and graphic designer
Matt McCorkle, Field recordist & sound designer
Reese Donohue (Tempo), Audio supervision
Emre Tanirgan, Audio developer
Jazia Hammoudi, Researcher
Rindon Johnson, Narrator

Research with:
Dr Alex Bond Senior Curator, Birds at Natural History Museum, Tring
Dr Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez Ecología Integrativa, CIIDIR Unidad Durango, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico

All field recordings by Matt McCorkle except:
Bat field recordings from Dr Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez
Additional parakeet field recordings courtesy Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Macaulay Library

Narration recorded and engineered by Sam Bardsley at Glas Hour Studio, Berlin.

All images by Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Parakeet specimen images courtesy Natural History Museum, London 

Supported on iPhone 6s and above