A Digital Swamp Coming to New York City’s MoMA Is ‘Made to Envelop You’ in Nature With the Help of Cutting-Edge Technology
“Wetland” is the latest installation of a high-tech traveling exhibition designed by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen. It recreates the overlooked ecosystem with the help of folklore, soundscapes and video game software
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A new-age swamp is bubbling up inside the lobby of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Beginning next week, visitors will find themselves stepping through a colorful, pulsing digital ecosystem that may seem a world away from the city’s urbanity and frenetic pace.
“Wetland,” an immersive exhibition by the Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, thrives in this sensory disconnect. Opening on October 12, MoMA’s newest show is a futuristic, digital vision of nature. It also opens a portal back to the mucky landscapes that major cities—including New York—were founded upon.
The installation harnesses macro photogrammetry and game-engine software (the architecture behind video games) to simulate the movements, sounds and sights of a large-scale swamp.
Wall-spanning screens display photographs and 3D scans of real-life wetlands. Digitally altered field recordings of amphibians and susurrating riverine rhythms have been mixed with human vocals, including those from the Venezuelan musician Arca.
“At MoMA, it’s made to envelop you—but with a sense of … dance,” Kudsk Steensen tells the New York Times’ Frank Rose. “Things appear. They vanish. They’re dark. They’re bright. They’re vocal.”
“Wetland” features just a single work of art: the simulated swamp installation known as Berl-Berl, which Kudsk Steensen has allowed to evolve since its creation in 2021.
Both Berl-Berl’s form and name were inspired by the swamps surrounding Berlin, many of which have fallen victim to urban development. The artist collaborated with Berlin’s natural history museum to devote months to studying the landscape. A combination of photography, sound recording, kayaking, swamp-slogging and archival research left Kudsk Steensen with a trove of material documenting humanity’s relationship with wetland habitats. The result was Berl-Berl, first installed in Berghain, a nightclub located in a sprawling decommissioned East German power plant.
“In the beginning, I thought I was just making an immersive show, with some nature sounds, some screens and some things that are moving around,” Kudsk Steensen told Dazed’s Juule Kay in 2021, ahead of Berl-Berl’s debut. “But when I walked around in the space, I started to whistle and clap and noticed the echo.”
Each iteration of the installation—in Denmark, South Korea, Switzerland and elsewhere in Berlin—remains in a state of flux. At times, folklore plays a central role. Triglav, a three-headed god from Slavic folklore, makes an appearance at MoMA in the form of a giant tree. Although absent from the MoMA iteration, the shape-shifting water spirit Nøkken, who is said to appear to travelers as a handsome, music-playing young man, often appears in the digital swamp, too.
“We used to sing to the world in order to navigate it,” Kudsk Steensen said in 2024. “And in Europe, in the past, there were many practices to create songs as ways of mapping terrains, especially rivers and swamps, because these are ever-changing landscapes.”
Did you know? Okefenokee Swamp
- In July, the United Nations added the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, which protects a swamp sprawled between Florida and Georgia, to its list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
- UNESCO described it as a “diverse mosaic of wetlands, savannas and forests” with stunning biodiversity.
In “Wetland,” Kudsk Steensen uses macro photogrammetry—the practice of turning microscopic details into larger images—to illuminate and archive the overlooked textures of wetland soils, plants and currents. Cutting-edge tools help bring the artist closer to nature instead of dividing him from it. “Technology for me, in the sense of being a medium, is a connector,” the artist has said.
“It’s fascinating,” Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design, tells the Times. “This most technological part of the museum is the one that really digs into nature, into consciousness.”
“Wetland” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from October 12, 2026, to March 7, 2027.
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