FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse is an ambitious artwork commissioned by Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. The long-form exhibition opens October 2025 (through May 2026) with four large-scale, digital installations nestled amongst the cacti-filled garden and exhibitions in two newly built contemporary gallery spaces. Our artwork will be the latest in a list of major biannual shows (Chihuly: 2021, Botero: 2023, ScanLAB Projects: 2025).
We are creating a portrait of a place over time, observing a year in the life of the Sonoran Desert.
We invite you to see and feel this desert city in a way that is impossible with traditional cameras or with your naked eye. Desert Pulse observes vast landscape moments and the intimate breath of cacti. We explore the Phoenix cityscape, waterways, and the Garden’s world-renowned collection. The artwork shines new light on the stoic, beautifully slow life of cacti revealing their rhythmic growth, heliotropic twists, and bursts of colourful exuberance.
Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett
The Sonoran desert is a vast and exciting new environment for both our UK studio and our timelapse cinematic technique. The flora is unique, sculptural and intricate. 150-year-old Saguaro cacti tower over our scanners, agaves shoot floral masts from inhospitable soil, and cactus flowers unfurl among expanding nests of spines.
Photo credit: ScanLAB Projects
Phoenix is at the forefront of many human and environmental dilemmas. Urban development around lush green golf courses creeps further into pristine desert landscapes. Vehicles rule in a city teaming with life, ingenuity, burgeoning semiconductor wealth and fields of impenetrable asphalt. A battle for water is underway: aquifers are sucked dry and watercourses controlled by a hundred years of monumental dam building following in the footsteps of the ancestral Hohokam canal system. Summer in America’s hottest city is getting hotter, longer, and deadlier than ever before, especially for the city’s poorest residents.
Photo credit: ScanLAB Projects
Humanity’s beautiful ingenuity and devastating impact are under the spotlight. The desert’s resilience and splendor shine bright. We bring our tools and our craft to bear witness: these artworks are an invitation for you to join us to pause, think, and hope.
Photo credit: ScanLAB Projects
We’ve been working for three years to learn about this part of the world and create this ambitious series of works.
In October 2023 five Phoenix-based photographers joined our team, extending their practice to include 3D scanning. They traversed the desert every day for an epic, year-long series of scans that form the backbone of our time lapse artwork. In London, we simultaneously built robotic camera rigs in climate-controlled chambers, meticulously navigating around flowering cacti, observing the unfolding of every delicate petal and spine. We have been exploring the hundreds of terabytes of data gathered, inventing entirely new ways to glimpse into our scans and unearth the stories within. We’ve been designing and prototyping the high fidelity LED sculptures that respond to the garden, weaving these stories and data back into the landscape.
Something really special is emerging.
We are honoured to be working with this wonderful team of incredible scientists, curators, journalists and local experts. Their expertise is humbling, and we are so grateful as we come to know more of the Sonoran Desert: the place, the flora, and the people.
Keep an eye on our Instagram and the Garden’s for behind the scenes updates. ScanLAB Projects Team, 12th June 2025.
Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects
Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects
Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects
Photo credits: Rick White-Pickett
Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects
Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects
Photo credits: Rick White-Picket