How can technology help us remember landscapes that cities have erased? At MoMA, Jakob Kudsk Steensen turns Berlin’s vanished wetlands into a living digital ecosystem—part archive, part soundscape, and part speculative future.
What lies beneath a modern city?
Beneath streets, buildings, transit lines, and layers of infrastructure are landscapes that once existed long before the urban environment took their place. Wetlands are among those hidden histories. At The Museum of Modern Art, Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen brings one such forgotten landscape into view with Wetland, an immersive digital presentation opening October 12, 2026, and continuing through March 7, 2027.
Installed in MoMA’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby on the first floor, the exhibition presents Berl-Berl, Steensen’s ongoing digital simulation of Berlin’s lost wetlands. The work transforms ecological research, field recordings, folklore, 3D scanning, and game-engine technology into an evolving audiovisual environment.
A City Remembered Through Its Swamp
The title Berl-Berl refers to a Slavic word for “swamp,” connected to the origin of the name Berlin. Steensen uses that linguistic history as a starting point for reconsidering the city—not simply as the European capital visitors know today, but as a place whose identity is deeply connected to a wetland landscape.
The artist’s approach begins with research rather than conventional landscape representation. Months of fieldwork in Berlin’s remaining wetlands informed the project, alongside archival research into Sorbian and Slavic mythology and investigations into the region’s linguistic history.
The result is not a digital reconstruction attempting to reproduce the past exactly. Instead, Berl-Berl imagines what a lost ecosystem might become when memory, science, folklore, sound, and computation are allowed to overlap.
When Ecology Becomes Digital
Steensen’s work occupies an unusual space between contemporary art, environmental research, digital simulation, and sound.
Using macro photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and game-engine technology, the artist builds a landscape that continuously changes. Local rocks, plants, and animals become part of the work’s visual and acoustic environment, while recordings gathered from wetlands are transformed into rhythm and song.
The technology is therefore more than a visual effect.
It becomes a way of seeing.
Digital tools allow Steensen to enlarge details that might normally escape human perception, combine different temporal layers, and construct an environment in which visitors encounter nature through an alternative sensory system. Rather than presenting technology and ecology as opposing forces, Berl-Berl uses technology as a bridge between them.
A Soundscape Made From Landscape
Sound plays an important role in the work.
The project developed through collaboration with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and musician Arca, alongside sound composer Matt McCorkle. Field recordings from wetlands were transformed into a musical environment, while local folklore and songs became part of the work’s conceptual foundation.
This creates a landscape that is not simply seen but heard.
The swamp becomes something closer to a living composition—one in which environmental sounds, voice, rhythm, geological material, plants, and animals occupy the same digital space.
That approach also changes the visitor’s relationship with the artwork. Instead of standing outside a traditional image of nature, audiences are invited to enter a simulated ecosystem and experience it as an environment.
Beyond the Human View
At the center of Wetland is a question that increasingly shapes contemporary ecological art: how might humans imagine the world beyond specifically human perspectives?
MoMA describes Steensen’s project as an invitation to imagine new encounters between human and “more-than-human” spheres. The work draws on memory, emotion, and imagination to reconsider how people relate to the natural world.
That idea is particularly resonant in New York.
Manhattan is one of the world’s most intensely urban environments, yet its present-day streets also conceal layers of geological and ecological history. Wetland asks viewers to consider that cities are not isolated from nature. They are built through transformations of it.
The digital swamp at MoMA can therefore be understood not simply as an image of Berlin, but as an invitation to think about urbanization itself.
From Environmental Archive to Speculative Future
There is also something distinctly contemporary about the way Steensen approaches the past.
A conventional archive preserves what has already happened. Berl-Berl does something more fluid. It becomes an archive that changes, allowing a vanished environment to remain imaginatively active.
Steensen’s own description of Berl-Berl presents the project as a way of connecting environmental history with possible futures. His broader practice combines field research and digital world-building to explore landscapes shaped by both human and nonhuman forces.
The digital landscape consequently operates between memory and speculation.
What was lost?
What remains?
And what might still be possible?
MoMA’s Digital Wall as an Ecological Space
Wetland is part of MoMA’s Hyundai Card Digital Wall program, which focuses on digital works and emerging technologies by contemporary artists. The program has been presented through a partnership between MoMA and Hyundai Card dating back to 2006.
The setting is significant. Rather than isolating the work inside a conventional black-box environment, MoMA places it in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, where the digital landscape becomes part of the museum’s larger public circulation.
The presentation also includes related programming. On October 16, MoMA’s Writing Club will host an in-person session with artist, poet, designer, and educator kathy wu focused on geopoetics and ideas inspired by Wetland, including environments, cartographies, geologic time, and technological imagination.
The Nature We Carry Into the Future
In an age when landscapes can be scanned, simulated, rendered, and experienced through screens, Wetland raises a deceptively simple question: does a digital representation of nature change how we understand nature itself?
Steensen does not appear to offer technology as a replacement for the physical world. Instead, his work uses digital systems to make ecological histories visible, audible, and emotionally accessible in new ways.
The lost wetlands of Berlin become a portal.
They connect language to geography, folklore to environmental science, field recordings to electronic sound, and physical ecosystems to virtual worlds.
At MoMA, the result is a landscape that cannot simply be walked through or photographed as a conventional environment. It must be observed as something constantly becoming.
And perhaps that is the most compelling idea behind Wetland: nature is not only something that exists outside the city.
It is also something the city remembers.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Wetland
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
October 12, 2026–March 7, 2027
Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, Floor 1
11 West 53rd Street, New York
As digital technology increasingly mediates our relationship with the world around us, Wetland asks us to look backward at what urban life has covered—and forward toward what forms of ecological imagination might still emerge.
The landscape may be virtual. The questions it raises are not.
