Pulse Points
Machine Vision Captures Sonoran Desert’s Living Rhythms
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photography Courtesy of ScanLAB Projects
A cholla cactus performs an almost imperceptible dance, its spiny arms swaying in slow motion against an azure sky. Sediment flows like liquid mercury across desert washes after phantom rains. Cactus blooms breathe in microscopic pulses, revealing the secret choreography of an ecosystem most consider static.
This is the Sonoran Desert as you’ve never seen it — captured through the electronic eyes of machines and transformed into “Framerate: Desert Pulse,” a groundbreaking exhibition that opened this fall at Desert Botanical Garden. Five monumental video installations now reveal the hidden life pulsing through our familiar landscape, challenging even longtime desert dwellers to see home through entirely new eyes.
London-based ScanLAB Projects has spent the past year documenting the subtle transformations of our desert landscape using pioneering 3D scanning technology, capturing billions of data points that reveal the constant, nearly imperceptible dance of life in the Sonoran ecosystem. The result is a multisensory experience that challenges even longtime desert residents to see their home through entirely new eyes.
“There’s this sense of surprising wonder — the thing that’s struck us most about the desert is just how full of life it is,” says Matt Shaw, co-founder and director of ScanLAB Projects. “That life is both vividly present and, at the same time, somehow hidden.”
Shaw and his creative partner William Trossell have built their artistic practice around what they call “machine vision” — the use of 3D scanning technology to capture reality with scientific precision while revealing poetic truths about the world around us. Their previous work has taken them to melting Arctic ice and former concentration camps, but the Sonoran Desert presented unique revelations.
“Phoenix, after all, is one of the hottest cities in America,” Shaw explains. “From our perspective, it exemplifies the realities of climate change — a city getting hotter and more extreme every year, sometimes to a dangerous degree.”
Yet what emerges from their yearlong documentation is not a story of harshness, but of resilience and surprising vitality. The installation’s five massive screens, positioned thoughtfully throughout Desert Botanical Garden’s landscape, display footage that transforms familiar desert scenes into something otherworldly yet deeply truthful.
The technology itself reads like science fiction. Teams of specialized photographers returned to the same 15 locations across the Valley every day for an entire year, capturing repeated 3D scans from identical positions. These sites ranged from the Tonto National Forest and Salt River to McDowell Mountain Preserve and carefully selected spots within Desert Botanical Garden itself.
“We don’t just show up with a concept and impose it on a location; it’s about engaging in a conversation with that place,” Trossell explains. “Asking how we can respond to it and how, through technology, we might tell truly beautiful and meaningful stories that come alive.”
The resulting footage captures phenomena invisible to casual observation: the microscopic movements of cactus blooms, the flow of sediment after rare desert rains, the seasonal breathing of an ecosystem that many mistakenly perceive as static. Layered onto this yearlong documentation are captures of events unfolding over mere hours, creating a temporal tapestry that reveals the desert’s multiple rhythms.
The visual complexity extends beyond individual screens. Shaw and Trossell, both trained architects, have designed the installation as a four-dimensional editing experience where images flow not just across screens but through the physical space of Desert Botanical Garden itself.
“The architectural design of the installation is critical to how audiences experience the piece,” Shaw notes. “Even though it’s digital — just screens — we care deeply about the materiality of those pixels. Every detail is carefully crafted.”
Composer Pascal Wyse has created an equally sophisticated soundscape that responds to and enhances the visual revelations, having captured audio recordings in precious locations including Antarctica and the Galapagos Islands. The result is a 20-minute immersive journey distributed across multiple screens that functions as both meditation and revelation.
For Elaine McGinn, Desert Botanical Garden’s chief experience officer, the project represents more than artistic innovation — it embodies the institution’s commitment to fostering deeper connections between visitors and the natural world.
“Curating ‘Desert Pulse’ has been a process of peeling back assumptions, inviting the viewer to consider not just what deserts are, but what they represent: resilience, transformation and the unseen networks that sustain life,” McGinn says. “The exhibition is not just a display of art — it is a meditation on what it means to belong, to remember and to reimagine the unique and beautiful place we call home, the Sonoran Desert.”
Desert Botanical Garden’s selection of ScanLAB Projects continues its tradition of hosting world-class artists like Dale Chihuly, Bruce Munro and Fernando Botero. But this exhibition breaks new ground by bridging art and science while addressing contemporary environmental concerns through a distinctly local lens.
McGinn discovered the artists at South by Southwest, where their prototype immediately resonated with her vision for art that transforms perspective.
“Will and Matt from ScanLAB have brought an entirely new dimension to what we hope to achieve with our art program,” she explains. “This exhibition is, above all, a deeply visceral experience. People leave not just thinking, but truly feeling — often in ways that are quite surprising.”
The project’s commitment to sustainability adds another layer of meaning to its environmental themes. ScanLAB has documented the carbon impact of every aspect of production, making choices that sometimes cost more but create less environmental impact. Its partnership with Rivian Automotive, which provides an electric R1T pickup for the project, underscores these values while supporting the artwork’s themes of innovation and environmental responsibility.
“We genuinely hope people appreciate the honesty with which we approach these decisions,” Shaw says. “Sometimes we make choices that complicate our process or cost us money, simply because they help us minimize our footprint.”
For viewers, the experience promises revelations both grand and intimate. McGinn has found her own relationship with the desert transformed by witnessing it through the artists’ technological lens.
“Now, when I drive out into the desert or even just around town, I find myself noticing things differently,” she reflects. “There’s one incredible cholla that almost appears to do a little dance. You’ll see — it’s truly fascinating.”
The installation reveals moments of human celebration alongside natural processes — a baseball game recording captures community joy while documenting our collective footprint on the landscape. Such juxtapositions invite reflection on how we inhabit and impact the desert environment.
Shaw hopes visitors will expand their temporal perspective beyond daily routines and individual lifetimes.
“There are moments in this piece where we hope viewers reflect on the timescale of a landscape or a river — features that have existed long before any of us and will likely persist long after we’re gone,” he says.
Simultaneously, the work captures fleeting moments — events too quick for normal perception — encouraging appreciation for the desert’s constant, subtle transformations.
“If we can encourage people to recognize and appreciate that this landscape is always changing—and that those changes aren’t always about us — I think that’s a truly beautiful place for people to arrive at,” Shaw concludes. “‘Framerate’ is a glimpse into the future of cinema, a sobering observation, and a hopeful moment — all at once.”
For desert dwellers who thought they knew their landscape intimately, the exhibition offers a profound gift: the chance to fall in love with home all over again, seeing familiar terrain through eyes that miss nothing and reveal everything.
