FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse

FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse is a portrait of Phoenix and the Sonoran Desert. Commissioned by Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, the exhibition opened in October 2025 and runs through May 2026 with four large-scale, digital installations nestled amongst the cacti-filled garden, a multi-channel exhibition in a newly-built contemporary gallery space and a gallery to glimpse behind-the-scenes.

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, the sudden eruptions of colour that pierce the seeming stillness.

Here, humanity’s beautiful ingenuity and devastating impact share the frame with the desert’s fierce resilience and quiet splendour. We bring our tools and craft to bear witness, creating an invitation to pause, observe, and imagine. These artworks ask you to join us in a moment of reflection to see, to feel, and to hope.

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Press: New York Times | Financial Times | Southwest Contemporary | Cool Hunting

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse - Artist Statement

FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse is a portrait of Phoenix and the Sonoran Desert: a flood of precisely engineered pointcloud poetry - data driven and crafted with intuition. It is our record, our response, and our invitation to bear witness to this landscape, and to the natural and human processes that challenge and sustain life here.

The work operates as both mirror and microscope. We move through time via repetition, frequency and speed; with detail and perspective we journey through space. At moments we shrink to the scale of an insect, at others we drift like clouds. These shifting vantage points expose and hold space for multiple truths: about our species’ devastating impact and wonderful creativity, and about the resilience and ingenuity of the natural world.

ScanLAB are visitors here, grateful for four years of exploration and research in this region. Desert Pulse is a reflection through our lens - it is also an invitation to see through your own. We offer a space for considering, honouring, and sharing perspectives - an opportunity for new frequencies of attention, individually, and in community.

Our studio values collaboration; this work is no exception. Local wisdom from scientists, farmers, and conservationists shaped our explorations and informed the 34 sites scanned across the valley. Our music incorporates Sonoran field recordings and the internal bioelectrical sounds discovered by mic’ing cacti themselves. Five dedicated Phoenix-based photographers joined our team, scanning the desert every single day, for an entire year. In London, botanists trusted us with their knowledge and specimens; we built robotic camera rigs in climate-controlled chambers in our studio, tracing every delicate flowering petal and spine with precision..

The result is terabytes of data that represents new ways of seeing and sensing. We find traces and imprints - echoes of coexistence, creation, and destruction. We measure and acknowledge the traces we leave in making this work.

In the space between a saguaro’s century-slow growth and an explosive Echinopsis bloom, between ancient aquifers and tomorrow’s suburbs in America’s hottest city, we see the Sonoran Desert alive and dense with adaptation. We see repeating human issues that unfold in our FRAMERATE works created at home and around the world. We are a part of this rhythm. We contribute to the cacophony, we are in sync, and we catastrophically collide with the beating pulse of our planet.

Photo credit: Rick White-Pickett

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.

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse

Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects

Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects

Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects

Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects

Photo credits: ScanLAB Projects