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Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and culture
Jamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.
This is a verbatim transcript of the conversation between Jamin Warren and Jacob
Kudsk Steensen.
Jamin Warren: ...Very dramatic. Very, very, very dramatic. I know.
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: Well, you can begin with a laugh, you know?
Jamin Warren: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Hello, everybody. My name is Jamin
Warren, and I'm very excited to be with you today with Jacob. He's spent the
last decade doing something really unusual, which is treating the video game
engine as a medium of ecological fieldwork. I love all the fieldwork stuff that
you've been doing over the last, you know, 15 years. All of his immersive
installations have grown from years of onsite research: underwater volcanic
vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, that experimental
forest in Minnesota... transforming them into virtual worlds that sit somewhere
between scientific document and living dream.
And so we're going to be focusing on some of the worxk that Jacob has been doing
for the Otherworlds show at Phi Centre in Montreal, which gathers five distinct
spaces and spans about 15 years, and then also talk a bit about Psychosphere,
which is built from photogrammetry and newly discovered submarine volcanic
landscapes, and then finally close it out with Song Trapper, which is part of an
expanding video game world called Evoker. Jacob, thank you so much. Let me share
this presentation... Or, let me...
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Jamin Warren: Yeah, of course. Hold on one second. Cool. Well, I think maybe to
get started, do you want to tell me about your background? How did you get into
working with games and game engines? And maybe also some early interest that you
had in ecology, in the natural world? Because we often don't think of those
things as being connected. You know, indoor kids kind of stay indoor kids. But
yeah, tell me a bit about your background.
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: Yeah, I mean... Do you have the picture of Facing Worlds?
Is that in here?
Jamin Warren: The Unreal map? Don't worry, I have it.
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: I just... this is kind of a good introduction because,
like, you know, I was... two things. So, I grew up in the countryside—I mean, I
grew up in different places with my mom—but I spent a lot of time in a really,
really small town on the West Coast of Denmark, near the water. There was, like,
less than 2,000 people lived there. And so, that was very outdoorsy. And my dad
is, like, very much into ornithology. And I kind of grew up around wetlands,
water, brackish water... and I’ve worked a lot actually with wetlands in a lot
of recent projects because I really know them from a personal level.
So, I grew up very close to environments in nature. But then at the same time,
you know, when this came out—this video game map—I was 12 years old. And I
bought a copy of Unreal Tournament, this video game where this map is from. And
this was like, kind of a game that really was part of a series of games that
really exploded full-on interactive, three-dimensional space in a very, like,
free-roaming, playful, organic way. And it came with a level editor. So you
could open up this map or other levels and change them around. This was like a
"Capture the Flag" game, and then I changed the play mode to other things, and I
started changing materials.
So I'm saying this because it was never like a conscious choice for me to sort
of work with video game engines or natural environments. I think I'm just an
exact generation where the two just really sort of happened. I mean, of course,
there have been natural environments forever, but like, a sense of climate
awareness, narratives about climate change, environmentalism... at the same time
as there is this explosion of full-on three-dimensional virtual worlds that you
can modify. When you buy a game, you can modify it. So I just grew up with that
very naturally. And I've just kind of accepted it. You know, as a kid, I wanted
to work in video games, and I wanted to be an animator of characters. But then I
went more into level editing. So I’ve used Unreal, or Source engine for
Half-Life, I used CryEngine for a little bit, a little bit of Unity... but I’ve
used Unreal since it came out. So for me, it's like a musical instrument. But I
very much fell in love with the spatial, environmental part of video game
technology. And I still use this.
Jamin Warren: Yeah. Do you feel like there are specific affordances for you
using Unreal versus like other video game engines? You mentioned it's like an
instrument for you. You know, if you're someone who plays guitar, they'll tell
you that there's a difference between a, you know, Les Paul versus like a
Stratocaster. They have very specific ways of talking about the fret action, and
the weight, and the feel, and the tone... Do you feel that way about game
engines as it relates to your work?
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: I think... I mean, I could probably have ended up really
focusing on another engine might as well, but I think there's something that
Epic Games did that was a little bit unusual. Like, Source did this too—so,
Source is the video game engine behind the video game Half-Life. And any game
that Epic has published, even before that, came with a version of the technology
used to make the game. So every time... it's like, they also make Fortnite now,
and revenue from Fortnite is why they can expand on the capabilities of Unreal.
If you don't have Fortnite, you do not have Unreal. Trust me, these two things
go hand-in-hand. They need... but they've done that for like 40 years or
something.
And so, it was a little happenstance, but around the same time there was also
like the Quake engine, but it was kind of difficult to use. The Unreal just came
with a very, like... you know, change these little things in the map in the
title, and then you go from like a multiplayer to a single player, or from
deathmatch to whatever. It was very immediate. For whatever reason, also like
working with textures and materials was very easy. Unreal Engine also comes
with—it's built in, them the new one—something called a Brush Editor. So you
could like block out a level directly in the video game software. So for if
you're like a solo developer and you're just playing around, it's very helpful
to have a tool where you're inside the software of the experience building the
experience. So there's less friction.
The other thing is that, you know, at the time of—now there's like Unreal
Engine 5—but when Unreal Engine 4 came around, it was after the 3 and they made
it open. So anybody can use it. And like, I was also using CryEngine a little
bit. CryEngine, this German company, legally... I don't know what it is now, but
when I was really starting to seriously, like, "Okay, now I'm going to start
doing pretty big art projects," Source engine in its contract does not allow you
to make anything but games. And I didn't really want to just make games. I mean,
I freelanced on game projects, I made mods, I started making like modifications
of Unreal and then building worlds with it. And I've done that since then, in
different engines, but just kind of stayed with that. So there are some things
for technical and IP and creativity.
Jamin Warren: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: There's also Unity, but the last thing that's really cool
about Unreal is that because it comes from Epic, they made this game called
Gears of War at some... I mean, this very like generic blockbuster title,
whatever, but it's just like... so every time they launched a title, they would
just essentially, they would just provide creators with like tools that take
millions of dollars to create, and they just give them to you. And so you could
just kind of pull off that a bit. And so they made this game Gears of War 1,
what it did is that it allows you to have a really complex 3D world, have a
timeline and a sequencer where you can control loads of different parameters at
the same time. You can kind of like visualize the whole transformation of the
three-dimensional world as you're in it. And that kind of clicked with me
because I was like, "Oh, I can have someone work on music over there. I can
start working on animation over here." And you can have all these elements and
you can work on them synchronously, which adds to this instrumental music band
way of working that is how I create work now. I work very kind of orchestral in
a way. I mean, that's how I think about it.
Jamin Warren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it does... like, it is this
transformational technology, I think, in terms of enabling small teams to do
things with—and that wasn't always the case. It used to require, you know, as
you know with game engines, you needed a lot more people and they were often
proprietary and you needed big teams to actually work with them. And it's been
interesting to kind of see we're kind of back to this moment where artists can
actually put together something really profound and uniquely expressive with the
same, the exact same thing that is used to basically ship these like enormous,
enormous games as well. So I do think we're at a really interesting, really,
really interesting inflection moment as it relates to video games and the
creative process.
Well, let's talk about Otherworlds. You know, Otherworlds is at Phi Centre in
Montreal. If you're in Montreal or in Canada or northeast part of the United
States, you can make it up to Montreal, you absolutely should. You know, it's an
interesting project for you because it basically kind of treats your archive as
the terrain. You've kind of been—one of the things I've liked about your work is
that you sort of approach these kind of same questions, albeit with different
tools, but often looking at these kind of same questions about how we interface
with the natural world, trying to ask these deeper questions. And so all these
past projects sort of are like chapters or levels or stanzas. When you're inside
a body of work like this large, how does it feel to like look back at all the
things that you've done?
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: Um, yeah, I got this question a lot at the opening or we
did a talk, and it's kind of difficult for me to answer, but it actually came
from one of my collaborators I work with a lot now, Lou O’Neil, which is like...
he joined my works five years ago and he said that it made him look a lot
different at older works. And so for me, it's like I'm looking at individual
pieces on their own kind of a bit the same as they're created, but the
combination of them just creates a different modality. It's like you walk from
documentation of underwater volcanoes to a collapsed glacier cave to songs of an
extinct bird, from virtual reality to like an interactive kind of
documentary-style game on an app to a purely sculptural room. And so there's
something about that journey and kind of pick and choose in a bit that I really
like about it, because it's like, if you're to see all of it you'd have to spend
like 10 hours or something.
So audiences are going to sort of drift through some worlds and then find
something—a narrative, a concept—that works, or visuals or sound or whatever,
that they feel like, "This is where I want to dive in." And that's the feeling I
have when I do environmental fieldwork and work with these biologists and people
in places. It's like you go to some of these landscapes and you can have an
infinite amount of information of species—I mean, rocks, lichen,
whatever—there's like an infinite amount of information from a scientific
perspective you have about the place. So you have to find "What is my entry
point? What can become an interesting artwork here?" So you kind of drift
around, you have some knowledge, and then I dive into something. And then I go
mega, mega, mega hard on that one thing. Recorded it, digitized it inside-out. I
mean, like, I've spent months in some of these locations that I work with.
Jamin Warren: Yeah, yeah. Was there anything that like surprised you looking
back?
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: Yeah, there was one thing, and that's I intentionally
brought in this thing I made... actually with Cry- I did a slight modification
of Far Cry 2 with the physics, so there are some island slopes you can't get up.
So I put the player outside a little island, so you're kind of like swimming
towards this island before you drown, but the slope is too steep. So you as a
player you hit this curve and you go around it and then you drown, and then
you're kind of resurrected and you have to swim to it. So it was kind of my
early way of trying to be like a conceptual artist. You know, I mean, this is...
I don't even... that's a while ago. 17 years ago or something. It's like, that
was actually really emotional for me to see because I remember thinking at the
time like, you know, I was trying to think like, what do you do as an artist? I
mean, how do you make a living, what do you do, what do you... and I was like,
"Oh, I'm going to try to do something really purely conceptual in here.
Something beyond like production or even a game." It's not even a game—I mean,
there's a little recording of this game on a monitor, right? This is like... I
can't even... I don't even have the game anymore. I have a video recording of
the gameplay. And it's this swimmer on this island drowning and swimming to it.
It's so basic. But like, but I almost got chills, the feeling that like, "Oh,
now I'm an artist doing this." And I collaborated and showed in museums and
everything, and it's like at the time that would be my wildest dream.
So it's very emotional seeing that, this journey. But also nice going back to
some early works because I have some earlier that was more kind of story-driven
and gamey. And it was really nice seeing those because I haven't done those so
much the past five years. I’ve done these like big musical immersive worlds. So
it was cool going back and seeing these like hybrid gaming interactive
installations and maybe I'll make a new one soon or something. There was
something that I felt was more like in the moment in a way—like there's lots of
artists doing these installations. And I've had the feeling for some years that
like, "Oh, but that's kind of weird to me to do that again because I've done
that before." But now I'm kind of attracted to that playful, hacky modality
gamey format. So maybe I'll make... I don't know, but maybe I'll... I was kind
of inspired by that, seeing some old works too. This is not just to be
self-referential, but it was... it's a cool feeling. I mean, it's a cool
feeling. And also because the technology has changed so much. So literally how
the work is looked and done is so different.
Jamin Warren: Right, right. And also that's like a testament to, you know, for
you consistently approaching games as a place where you could explore ideas.
Because that's not always true. Sometimes people dip in, they do one project,
and then they they move on. It doesn't become a formative part of their their
practice.
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: I love the expressive quality that's possible in
real-time 3D. It's incredible. I mean, it's amazing. So painterly.
Jamin Warren: Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, you know, along those lines, you
know, some of the language around how Otherworlds is being presented uses games
pretty, pretty explicitly. I believe like "levels of an unfolding video game" is
in the, in some of the promotional material for the Phi description. But at the
same time, you know, you're... you don't make, you know, commercial video games
in that, you know, sort of in that traditional sense and at times have kind of
refused some of the mechanics that you might find in games. What do you feel
like you are like keeping from games? You know, like what are the things that
you look at games like, "Yeah, I want to keep that," and then what are things
that are like, "Actually I don't need that in my in my work right now"? It's
often because you're sort of in between these spaces so you do have to make
these decisions around like, you know, what you would like to keep and what you
would like to let go.
Jacob Kudsk Steensen: Yeah, I mean I would like to make a more interactive game
again soon. But the main thing is that the process of creation is very fluid
when working with a game engine. So that's one thing that attracts me a lot. You
have different artists, people, perspectives, sound, music, animation, whatever,
architecture, that has to work together. But if one piece of code breaks the
whole thing breaks. So literally when you compile the software, all of it has to
communicate. If one breaks, the entire thing will break. It will not compile.
You cannot run it. And so that means that by the nature of that, you have to
work quite unilateral.
And there's a culture in game development of... you know, you have a hunch, you
have an ambition, but you can't fully describe the experience of it. Because you
have to go through kind of a human creation process to hit the feeling of
playing it. And I'm very inspired by that. So if I create, I mean, there's also
a VR work in the show from eight years ago, I work with this composer Michael
Riesman that is the key collaborator of Philip Glass, we became friends in New
York, and he built like this generative music instrument that I put inside the
VR. And there's like a moment to some people, just some, where they... they
almost cry, and like, I received letters from people who have experienced this
VR work about this music and this extinct bird. But to get to that there's just
this crazy iterative process. It's like five scenes in the work, different
colors, sound, light, and there's a sense of like resonance with that between me
making the 3D worlds and work with Michael on the music that had to sort of fit
together to create that embodied experience.
And that's really from the creation what I really like about games. It's like,
you talk to people in industry, more or less, that is very playful. And the
playfulness in the process is what gets you, even if you make a game with good
gameplay, it's what gets you to the gameplay. I mean, unless you're a big
blockbuster studio that like repeats the same gameplay all the time. At in the
beginning they had to find that, you know? So you... and so that really attracts
me.
But making kind of interactive explicit playable game experiences at museums is
something... I did some VR works that was perhaps my way of doing that like
eight years ago because what I like there is that um the barrier—I mean
regardless of if I like VR now or not and so on—it's like it's a virtual
three-dimensional world, there's a space changing and all you need to be able to
interact with that 3D world... I mean, okay you put something on the head but
then you just use your body. So ironically the barrier to entry is so much
smaller than a video game controller in an exhibition. This is so much harder
for most people. Unless you're like gaming native and then it's like if you go
into that space then you make something really niche and I do that- I am working
on some projects to doing that and kind of appreciate that culture. But I took
that away for some years and instead I went into this the more like orchestral
and collaborative dimension of video game technology to build large-scale
immersive exhibitions to the point now where we have like a custom sound system,
we digitize exhibition architecture, we put it in a game engine, we move like 30
speakers around, they are triggered by virtual worlds and effects and I use like
a really complicated generative almost like an open-world mechanic where
everything changes that actually runs behind the scenes and then it pivot out in
a local area network to multiple computers that connect screens and speakers,
glass sculptures and all this stuff.
So I've kind of tried to build out a very ephemeral way of experiencing
something in proximity to the experiences I would have sitting in 3D software or
if you know how to play games but also a little bit for people who may never
have had an interactive three-dimensional experience. I mean a lot of people
really when you deal with large museum crowds—I mean these are shows some of
them is like 30,000, 100,000 visitors—there's some considerations to occupy that
space that for me at least, I genuinely want people to enter these environments.
You know, I so accessibility is actually a big thing for me. So that's that's
the thing I kind of took out was more explicit like gameplay in that sense for
some years at least. But that was cool seeing some older works too where it's
actually there. And I was like, you know, this is actually really nice.
