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