Works of Nature
Our first-ever solo exhibition consists of a series of immersive artworks, video editions and prints woven into a single narrative inviting the audience to explore a single breath.
Works of Nature illuminates the hidden forces surrounding us, revealing the sublime through sensory journeys beyond our everyday perception. From the roots of a majestic Amazonian tree to the unseen branches of the body and the birth of galaxies, this hypnotic, immersive experience explores the rhythm that cultivates and connects all life – breath.
Each experience situates the audience in an encounter that traces the threads of our co-existence, expanding our sense of self beyond our bodies, reaching out into a sensuous and more-than-human experience of the world.
Works of Nature features a series of major digital artworks on a grand, awe-inspiring scale. Through guided meditation, large-scale screen works, and interactive experiences, visitors evolve from droplets of water to plants, cells, and stars, becoming part of the cycle of life and the cosmos. Curated by ACMI’s Chelsey O’Brien and produced with ACMI, Works of Nature aims to reframe our relationship with the more-than-human world through our invisible yet fundamental connection with the web of life.
Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Works of Nature features;
Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, 2022
The Journey of Breath (Evolver), 2022-2023
The Breathing Cell (Evolver), 2022-2023
Evolver VR, 2022
Tides Within Us (Prints), 2019
The Scale of Things (Video editions), 2018
Distortions in Spacetime, 2018-2023
We Live in an Ocean of Air (Video edition) 2019-2020
Humanity’s dependence on the natural world is absolute, from the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. The protection and regeneration of ecosystems are fundamental to our collective futures. But statistics and facts do little to change behaviours, develop new perspectives or create new stories. Works of Nature confronts this issue through awe-inspiring experiences and artworks, revealing a global system that intimately ties all the natural world into a wondrous rhythm that underpins life on Earth.
There have been up to 10 mass extinction events in the Earth’s history. Nearly all have been caused by an imbalance between oxygen and carbon dioxide: too much oxygen and things get cold, too much carbon dioxide and things get hot. In an age where excess carbon dioxide is fuelling the climate crisis, the simple act of breathing can engage us with this cycle of life in an intimate way, helping us reflect on our dependence and responsibility to the organisms we share the planet with.
In bringing together a series of major artworks, this monographic show invites visitors to journey across the biosphere, a beautifully complex system that connects us to everything, through the symbiotic process of respiration.
Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, 2022
The artwork is a large-scale video installation that creates a moment of awe, felt when we embrace the presence of a majestic being, a giant Ceiba Pentandra from the Colombian Amazon. The artwork promotes radical thinking on a new ecology in the age of the Anthropocene. The video installation offers a shift to our daily perception; “as the victims of plant blindness, we are simply unable to notice plant kingdom’s liveliness, they are so different from us that we have to invent new ways of seeing and apprehending them”.
Originally commissioned by Barbican Centre’s Our Time on Earth exhibition, Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest sets the tone of the show for Works of Nature as the visitors enter the gallery.
Evolver: Journey of Breath, 2022-2023
Originally devised as a virtual reality experience, Evolver has been reimagined for Works of Nature. Now features a deep listening meditation and a series of immersive screen installations. These large-scale works take visitors deep inside the landscape of the human body, from the exhale of a tree to the first intake of human breath, Evolver is a voyage through the body, following the flow of oxygen to its origin as a single living.
Evolver: The Breathing Cell, 2022-2023
Derived from Evolver’s original virtual reality experience, The Breathing Cell invites the audience to lie back and embark on a journey inward through overhead projection. Accompanied by multichannel audio, the journey creates the sensation of floating as they follow the oxygen deep into colonies of cells reminiscent of galaxies, arriving at a single ‘breathing’ cell in the human ecosystem. Modelled from real data from The Allen Institute for Cell Science, the experience is an open-eyed meditation, where particles pulse to a resonance breathing rhythm, drawing the audience into a state of flow. The journey climaxes with cellular respiration; the energy of the sun captured by plants is released, a process that powers every one of our trillions of cells. This poses the question, who is breathing who?
Distortions in Spacetime, 2018-2023
Death is the source of life – a star must die so that you might live.
Distortions in Spacetime is an interactive installation featuring a single-channel video and multichannel audio that plunges the audience into the heart of a collapsing star on the brink of forming a new black hole. As visitors draw nearer, they experience ‘spaghettification’ — being stretched by the intense gravitational forces at the densest and most powerful point in the universe, where even light cannot escape.
In a giant star’s final moments, atoms compress to a point where density becomes infinite, time stretches to a stop and the gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape – a black hole. But the force that creates this dark shadow also spews out a supernova explosion filled with the power of creation. A cosmic cascade of heavy elements fused in the heart of the star. The ingredients for life that eventually coalesce to form planets, plants and people. Our concept of reality is entwined with how our bodies are structured to perceive the world. Scientific inquiry, probing the nature of nature, reveals a much broader spectrum of reality that lies beyond our perception.
The Big Bang produced only the lightest elements: hydrogen and helium. All other elements, the building blocks of life, were forged in the thermonuclear cores of supernovas, which are also responsible for the birth of stellar black holes. As Carl Sagan puts it; Our existence hinges on these dying stars; the atoms composing everything we hold dear were once part of a star. Recognising that life’s source springs from these stars greatly deepens our sense of wonder for the interconnectedness of the living world.
We Live in an Ocean of Air (Video Edition), 2018-2023
The installation derived from the multisensory virtual reality experience that was launched in London in 2018-2019. The meditative projection reveals the upward flow of water through a LIDAR scan of a giant sequoia in northern California. Much like the flow of blood through our bodies, the trees have a kind of heartbeat, pulsing with the rising and setting of the sun.
These trees exist on a scale the human mind struggles to comprehend. They are the largest individual organisms on Earth, they grow taller than a ten-storey building and live more than three thousand years and we are intimately connected with them through breath.
We are intimately connected with the trees. We share breath with these ancient beings, in some ways they can be seen as an extension of our lungs, what we breathe out the trees breathe in, the oxygen the trees exhale flows into our tree-like lungs, flowing from our heart centre outward, through fractal branching arteries to feed every cell in our body.
This video installation is part of an exploration that reveals the connections between plants and animals and honours the trees as ancient breathing beings that sustain life on Earth.
Works of Nature Soundscapes
While developing the artworks featured in Works of Nature, we interviewed foremost thinkers on nature, life, and the more-than-human world. You can listen to these insightful conversations with renowned cultural ecologist and geophilosopher Dr. David Abram, Professor of Plant-Soil Processes at the University of Sheffield Katie J. Field, author and founder of Schumacher College Dr. Stephan Harding, and biologist and bestselling author Dr. Merlin Sheldrake in four episodic soundscapes.
Here you can listen to the full episodes on care, collectivity, breath and death.
As an artist collective, we seek to find emotional resonance in the scientific stories that connect us to the more-than-human world. When coupled with emerging technologies, these stories deepen our understanding of what it is to be something other than human.
This behind-the-scenes video encapsulates the themes and approaches we’ve been following in the making of the artworks that make up Works of Nature.
Credits
ACMI
Curator: Chelsey O’Brien
Senior Exhibitions Project Coordinator: Cody Buchanan
Interpretation: Matt Millikan
Exhibition Design: Eleanor Rieniets
Exhibitions Technical Manager: Glenn Willey
Senior Exhibitions Technician
Registrar: Sarah Brown
Head of Exhibitions: Melissa Gilmore
Head of Experience, Product & Digital: Lucie Paterson
Head of Communication Design: Hannah Richardson
Senior Graphic Designer: Robert Cordiner
Lighting Design: Relume, John Ford
Executive Director of Programming: Keri Elmsly
Executive Director of Experience & Engagement: Britt Romstad
Director & CEO Seb Chan
Marshmallow Laser Feast
Directed by Ersin Han Ersin, Barnaby Steel, Robin McNicholas
Director of Strategy and Development: Eleanor (Nell) Whitley
Managing Director: Mike Jones
Executive Producer: Alex Rowse, Carolina Vallejo
Head of Technology: Michael McKellar
Head of Production: Lauren Anderson
Senior Producer: Martin Jowers
Touring & Distribution Manager: Derek Rae
Producer: Emma Hamilton, Lydia Entwistle
Assistant Producer: Emmanuel Adanlawo, Anya Tye, Amin Noor
Infrastructure Lead: Andrew Robinson
Technical VFX Artist: Nico Le Dren
Games Engine Generalist: Nils Johannesson
Junior 3D Designer: Josef McGrath
Junior Backend Developer: Maria Astakhova
Designer: Amy Johnson
Head of Studio: Sarah Gamper Marconi
Financial Controller: Georgia Hines
Studio Assistant / Administrator: Alex McRobbie
PR and Media Relations: Margaret London
Project Contributors
Marshmallow Laser Feast: Works of Nature
Director of Sound, Composer & Sound Designer: James Bulley
Copywriter: Astella Saw
Sound Technician: Simon Hendry
Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, 2022
Marshmallow Laser Feast
In collaboration with James Bulley & Andres Roberts
Originally commissioned by Barbican Immersive
Lead Artist: Quentin Corker-Marin
Lead Producer: Andrew Stone
Producer: Oriana Neidecker
Houdini Technical Artist: Lewis Saunders
Evolver, 2022
Deep Listening Meditation, VR Experience, The Journey of Breath, The Breathing Cell, The Beating Heart
Marshmallow Laser Feast
In collaboration with Natan Sinigaglia
Narrated By Cate Blanchett
Executive Producers: Edward R. Pressman & Terrence Malick
An Atlas V, Pressman Film and Marshmallow Laser Feast Production
In Co-production with Artizen and Orange
In Association with Dirty Films
Supported by Nicole Shanahan & Bia-Echo Foundation
Executive Producers: Nicole Shanahan, Cate Blanchett, Coco Francini, Andrew Upton, Paula Paizes, René Pinnell
Producers: Antoine Cayrol, Sam Pressman
Co-Producers: Guillaume Brunet, Morgan Bouchet
Assistant Director for VR: Emma Hamilton
Director of Sound, Composer & Sound Designer: James Bulley
Sound Designer & Spatial Sound Artist: Henrik Oppermann
Music by Jon Hopkins, Meredith Monk, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Yair Elazar Glotman, Hildur Guðnadóttir & Robert Aiki, Aubrey Lowe, Howard Skempton, Jonny Greenwood
Poetry / Narrative Text: Daisy Lafarge
Senior Backend Engineer: Lucas Moskun
Lead Houdini Artist: Lewis Saunders
Senior Technical Artist: Quentin Corker-Marin
Graphics Programmer: Stephen Henderson, Sebastian Monroy
Sound Technician: Simon Hendry
Narrative Workshop Designer: Ben Templeton
Junior Designer: Joy Evelyn Wilson
Line Producer: Oriana Neidecker
Production Assistants: Maria Andreyuk, Caro Malis
Visual Direction, System Design and Graphics Programming: Natan Sinigaglia
Technical Direction & Programming: Christian Lutz-Weicken
Programming: Chris Riekoff, Kyle McLean, Bryan Mischling, Seb Escudie, Lars Eckhoff
Technical Consulting And Support: vvvv Team
Key Scientific Collaborator: Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS
Scientific Collaborators: Jennifer Garrison, Buck Institute for Research on Aging, The Allen Institute for Cell Science, Kinda Studios
Evolver: Deep Listening Meditation Music
‘Tayos Caves’ Performed by Jon Hopkins. Licensed courtesy of Domino Recording Company Limited and Domino Publishing Company Limited. (PRS)
Evolver: The Breathing Cell Music
‘Lento’ Composed By Howard Skempton, Performed By BBC Symphony Orchestra Mark Wigglesworth © Oxford University Press 1994. Licensed By Oxford University Press,
NMC Recordings Ltd.
The Tides Within Us (Prints), 2019
Marshmallow Laser Feast
In collaboration with Erik Ferguson
Distortions in Spacetime: Video Editions, 2018
Marshmallow Laser Feast
Lead 3D Animator: Chris Thompson
Distortions in Spacetime, 2018-2023
Marshmallow Laser Feast
Audio Design and Spatialisation: James Bulley
Lead Visual Artist: Natan Sinigaglia
Senior Developer: Randall Vasquez
Installation Technician: Adi Wiedersheim Sendagorta
Editorial consultant: Dan Tucker
Science consultation: Samaya Nissanke, University of Amsterdam
Originally Commissioned by: Manchester Science Festival, part of the Science Museum Group In partnership with The British Science Festival and the University of Hull
We Live in an Ocean of Air: Video Edition, 2018-2023
Marshmallow Laser Feast
In collaboration with Natan Sinigaglia & James Bulley
Executive Producer: New Balloon
Technical Director: Louis Mustill
Lead Visual Artist: Natan Sinigaglia
Sound Engineer: Simon Hendry
System design and graphics programming: Elias Holzer, Joreg, Sebastian Gregor, Tebjan Halm
VVVV Developers: Will Young, Randall Vasquez, Chris Plant
Fluid Simulation Design: Johannes Timpernagel
Environment VFX: Lexhag
Concept Advisor: Sam Smith
Botany Advisor: Dr. Jo Elworthy