Desert Botanical Garden is presenting FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse, a new installation by the UK artist-led studio ScanLAB Projects that tracks subtle, daily transformations across Phoenix and the wider Sonoran Desert over the course of a year. Using in-house 3D scanning methods, the project brings together art, environmental observation, and sound to render processes that are typically hard to perceive at human scale. The Garden frames the commission as both documentation and public encounter: an evolving record of the desert’s rhythms and a platform for sustained attention to a fragile ecosystem.
The installation unfolds across the Garden’s cactus-filled grounds through four monumental, spatialized screen works, complemented by an indoor, multi-screen presentation in the RAF Exhibit Gallery. Immersive soundscapes by Pascal Wyse anchor the visual material, which blends point-cloud imagery, photography, time-lapse sequences, and spatialized audio. Visitors encounter a composite of phenomena—from flowering cycles and sediment shifts to phases of regrowth—translated into moving image and sound. The emphasis is on observation rather than spectacle, inviting close attention to incremental change and the ways a landscape registers time.
Desert Pulse builds on ScanLAB’s ongoing FRAMERATE series. For this iteration, the studio deploys a proprietary time-lapse 3D scanning technique, using advanced LiDAR to record the same sites at regular intervals over a full twelve-month period. The resulting dataset, captured under consistent conditions and from repeatable vantage points, reveals minor shifts in landscape structure and surface activity that conventional photography or short-term observation might miss. By returning to locations across Phoenix and the Sonoran Desert, the team compiles a frame-by-frame account of slow change made legible at exhibition scale.
The project’s scale is notable. The Garden describes Desert Pulse as the largest and most ambitious installment in the series to date, extending the method to a network of desert sites and presenting the results at architectural scale. Production and logistics are part of the story: the scanning team relies on Rivian R1T electric vehicles to reach fifteen desert locations each day, aligning fieldwork with a sustainability brief shared by the Garden and the studio. The partnership underscores a focus on reduced emissions and long-term environmental stewardship, embedding practical transport choices within the work’s environmental aims.
Sustainability is addressed directly within the exhibition. A companion presentation, “Making Desert Pulse,” details how ScanLAB and the Garden have monitored and mitigated the project’s environmental impact across scanning, installation, and presentation phases. The organizers report a current projection of 140.64 tCO2e for total project emissions and state that, through reduction and mitigation measures, the work will be certified carbon neutral. By making the production process transparent and accountable, the project extends its documentary ethos to its own footprint and methods.
Public programming broadens the installation’s focus on observation and place. Alongside the exhibition, the Garden is offering events oriented toward community storytelling, field-based sketching and journaling, emerging-artist spotlights, and conversation-driven forums. Series such as “Barflies Presents: Rooted: Voices of Our Community,” “Nature Journaling: Sketching through Time,” “Desert Studio: Emerging Artists Series,” “Seeing Time Series: A Photographer’s Journey through Change in the Sonoran Desert,” “Desert Views: A Conversation Series,” and evening “Pulse Parties” create multiple entry points for different audiences. Each program poses the same core question as the artwork: how to see and discuss change that is often incremental yet consequential.
ScanLAB Projects—led by Matt Shaw and William Trossell—is internationally recognized for pioneering machine-vision approaches in the service of aesthetic and documentary aims. The studio’s practice revolves around a distinctive point-cloud vocabulary and a sustained interest in how technology can render the beauty, fragility, and resilience of environments. Past bodies of work have ranged from documenting former concentration camps and melting Arctic ice to creating spatial archives of cultural spaces such as Stephen Hawking’s office—projects that together articulate a record of places and processes at risk of loss or misapprehension. The consistent through-line is a commitment to translating complex, often unseen dynamics into forms the public can apprehend.
The team is deliberately interdisciplinary, bringing together architects, craftspeople, photographers, engineers, documentary filmmakers, and software developers. Collaborations with choreographers, musicians, writers, technologists, climate scientists, and academic researchers enable the studio to move between galleries and other public spheres such as performance, journalism, and environmental advocacy. Their work has been exhibited widely—including presentations at the Royal Academy (UK), LACMA (USA), Venice Biennale (IT), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), the Barbican (UK), the Photographers’ Gallery (UK), STRP Biennial (NL), Espacio Fundación Telefónica (ES), Southbank Centre (UK), the Science Museum (UK), the New Museum (USA), CPH:DOX (DK), SXSW (USA), the Berliner Ensemble (DE), and Tribeca (USA)—and has been covered by major media outlets. Past collaborators include Danny Boyle, Greenpeace, Apple, MIT, Forensic Architecture, and Cambridge University, reflecting the studio’s range and appetite for cross-disciplinary work.
Desert Botanical Garden provides a distinctive setting for a project centered on desert ecologies. The institution features five thematic trails and a living collection of approximately 50,000 plants, with a sustained emphasis on the Sonoran Desert. In addition to conservation and research initiatives, the Garden produces exhibitions, seasonal events and festivals, and learning experiences for a wide public. Situating FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse among saguaro and cholla, rather than within a conventional gallery box, underscores the installation’s premise that subject and site are inseparable. Placing the work within a living collection invites visitors to compare the imagery’s temporal registers with the plants and terrain immediately around them.
Visitor information is straightforward. The Garden notes that tickets and general details are available through its website, and it highlights the project’s appeal to a broad constituency: audiences interested in art and design, those engaged with environmental change and data visualization, and residents seeking a different way to read familiar terrain. The exhibition’s structure—distributed screens outdoors, concentrated viewing indoors—encourages repeat visits and varied encounters, mirroring the work’s cumulative method.
Ultimately, FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse proposes a way of seeing: not a single sweeping image of the desert, but a sequence—a ledger of small accumulations and losses inscribed over time. By presenting that ledger at human scale, the Garden and ScanLAB Projects position the Sonoran Desert as a place where change is constant, legible, and worthy of careful attention, while making the production of the work itself part of the same conversation about impact and stewardship.
Venue and dates: Desert Botanical Garden, 1201 N Galvin Pkwy, Phoenix, AZ 85008 — October 11, 2025 to May 10, 2026.
