Anny Wang and Tim Söderström have been playing around with tech in one form or another ever since they were teenagers. Coming of age during the halcyon days of the early internet, amid a thriving culture of online piracy, meant they would spend much of their time on their home computers, downloading new digital software and figuring out their own ways of using it.

“In a way, we were hardwired to work naïvely,” says Söderström. “Similarly today, we’re perhaps not using digital technology in the most streamlined way, but we are finding ways to create what we want. And I think the more people use tools like this, it’s pushing the boundaries of technology and what the outcomes can be, not only predetermined by the original idea of the tool.”

Having met and started dating in 2011, the couple decided to launch their multi-disciplinary studio in 2016, creating everything from 3D animations to sculptures and installations. Their shared obsession with blurring the lines between physical and digital worlds first developed while they were at university. Söderström was studying architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Wang was doing spatial design at the University of Gothenburg, where they were introduced to 3D software as a means to create drawings and renderings.

“We learned the software to visualise our work at school, and then we started to experiment during the weekends and evenings, so we are kind of self-taught in that sense,” says Wang. “That opened up a portal for us … for the first time, it was a medium where we could truly express and go a bit wild in the expression. We found it very intuitive, the whole thing.”

The early days of Wang & Söderström saw the duo lean more towards commercial 3D visualisations – or “visual candy”, as Söderström describes it – as they sought to fund the studio. During this period, they worked with brands ranging from adidas to the New York Times. But against the backdrop of tech’s growing omnipresence in people’s lives, they increasingly felt they ought to be using their practice to address some of the big societal questions that were bubbling up.

“We often think about technology and the digital world as something magical. What happens when we think of stuff as magical is we become lazy, we become less critical, and we understand less and less of our world and how it functions,” says Wang. “But technology has been with us historically and helped us broaden our perception skills as we learn about different ways to perceive life and the world. How, then, can future technologies extend our senses, enrich us and the world, instead of trying to replace it?”

In 2021, the studio received a three-year working grant from the Danish Arts Foundation, which allowed them to explore more of these questions through research, exhibitions and artistic collaborations. In their short film, Rehousing Technosphere (2022), for instance, they play with the tone and structure of a nature documentary to imagine how life forms might adapt to a new planetary ecology in the future, while The Liminal Eatery (2023) is a mixed reality installation exploring how sensory activities such as dining, writing and socialising are evolving into online routines.

We are still living in very much the same pattern as before, it’s just that the ones in power are no longer the monarchy or the state; today it’s the tech giants

More recently, the duo’s solo exhibition, Techno Mythologies, placed their AR creations and 3D animations alongside 16th-century royal sculptures in the historic setting of Christian IV’s Brewhouse in Copenhagen. Explaining the choice of location, Wang says: “We are still living in very much the same pattern as before, it’s just that the ones in power are no longer the monarchy or the state; today it’s the tech giants who have the power.”

If the last three years have taught them anything, it’s that art has a vital role to play when it comes to making sense of our relationship with technology. “The way we imagine futures is such an important tool we need to use as humans,” she says. “Our left hemisphere of the brain is overworked in our daily life. We use it for Zoom meetings, problem-solving, troubleshooting. The right hemisphere, where the imagination lives, is less and less used today. Art connects that part of the brain that needs this childlike play and imagination, where we can start thinking about alternative futures instead of living in the status quo.”

Given the sheer level of hype surrounding AI in recent years, it’s not surprising that the technology has been another area of interest for the duo. So far, they’ve mainly used it as a tool to help them with things like coding or helping their “left brain relax a little bit”, as Söderström puts it. But they’ve also been doing a lot of research into its longer-term implications – both positive and negative.

Söderström cites one recent research paper he read that focused on how AI language models are being used to help translate between humans, plants and animals. “It really is one of these tools that is enlarging our world, and I just love this optimistic take that if it can make people talk with mushrooms and dolphins, maybe even politically people would be able understand each other a little bit better.”

As for what’s next for Wang & Söderström, they note their upcoming exhibition, Sharp Feelers and Soft Antennas at Gothenburg’s Röhsska Museum, which will ask how humans can borrow from the ways in which insects perceive the world in order to sharpen our own “digital sensors”. Later this year, they’re also planning to launch a sister studio that will focus on exploring new media for commercial clients.

Above all, though, continuing to push the boundaries of digital art remains the prime motivation for the duo. While they both note that the art form has been overlooked historically, they believe this attitude is finally starting to shift. “A lot of the technology we use has been naturalised, so we don’t even think about it as technology. For instance, writing is a technology, weaving is a technology,” says Wang.

“It’s more focused on high tech or new tech, and that’s the vision we have of technology. Of course, when there’s some new technological development, like NFTs or AI, for a while new digital things are going to be put in the ‘digital art’ space. And then eventually these things will become labelled not as digital art but simply art.”

wangsoderstrom.com