Scanlab Projects

FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse is a portrait of a place over time:
a year in the life of Phoenix and the Sonoran Desert.

Vast landscapes ebb and flow. The intimate breath of cacti is revealed.
Fragile soil subtly shifts. Sudden rushes of green flood desert floors. The sun arcs across epic rock formations. Heat lingers, longer each year.
Old life bakes into slow decay. Scorched. New life emerges. Succulent forms fold, expand, contract, and blossom in an exquisitely adapted response. 

Phoenix grows.  New asphalt laid; new homes born.
We irrigate, cultivate, herd, harvest, consume.
We gather - in ritual, in routine, in celebration.
Together we make beautiful patterns and leave permanent imprints.

Desert Pulse invites your attention,  a different perspective attuned to different timescales:
The lifespan of a saguaro. The slow formation of an aquifer. The fleeting blaze of a bloom.

Join us to contemplate change, and the pace of change.
To pause, to think, to hope.

‘Desert Pulse’ Gallery
365 days of LiDAR data and 93 days timelapse photogrammetric data, pointcloud animation, multi-channel video, spatial audio
24 minute loop

FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse, now open at Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix ().

photos courtesy : ScanLAB Projects,

17 million years of spheroidal weathering - 2,000 slingshot seed balls - 7,687 horseshoe prints - 3 saguaro spines, nail-polished red

Twelve months of faithful observation. Twelve months of digital pilgrimage.

We widen our view, extend, journey, explore. Our camera travels. The landscape reveals itself over layered time: the time it takes for a cactus to grow, for a path to form, for rain to fall, for fire recovery.

Fresh horseshoe prints mark the sand between boulders shaped by 17 million years of spheroidal weathering. 

Saguaros, previously measured by hand, are bathed daily in delicate, millimetre-precise waves of infrared LiDAR. We witness them hydrate, expand, store, conserve over 12 patient months.

The scorched earth of the Diamond Fire transforms: catastrophic charcoal to promising green and quickly tinder brown again.

‘Elsewhen’
365 days of LiDAR data, pointcloud animation, single channel video, composed audio
10 minute loop
h.3300 x w.3260 x d.300mm

FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse, now open at Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix ().
photos courtesy : ScanLAB Projects,

Thousands of stunning images. Five monumental video installations. One transformative experience.

It was our joy and honor to welcome the first visitors to ‘FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse’ . These artworks are 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. Open to the public 11 October.

photos : the artists,