Taking place at Desert Botanical Garden from Oct.11 through May 10, “FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse” is a multisensory art experience that invites viewers to delve into the emotional and visual energy of the Sonoran Desert. To design the exhibition, London’s ScanLAB Projects co-directors Matthew Shaw and William Trossell worked with five local Arizona photographers to capture years’ worth of desert expeditions through a mash-up of photography, technology and 3D scanning. The result is a sustainability-centric exhibition that reveals ways of seeing and appreciating the desert’s unique ecosystem through lively sound, photography and motion. Here, we chat with Shaw and Trossell about the project. (dbg.org)

Q&A: Bringing the Desert to Life

How did your collaboration with Desert Botanical Garden start?

Tammy McLeod, CEO of the Flinn Foundation, is a close collaborator of Desert Botanical Garden. She saw our work “FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth” at SxSW in early 2022. That piece observes landscapes from our home, the UK, as they shift over time under the influence of nature and humankind. Desert Botanical Garden saw our artistic intention with FRAMERATE: a truly unique way to pay homage to a landscape, to celebrate it and also to question the way we as a species use and relate to the planet. They immediately wondered what it would be like to bring that technique and our way of seeing the world to the Sonoran Desert and the Desert Botanical Garden.

Tell me more about this year’s exhibition.

We have created 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 the 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 colorful exuberance. The FRAMERATE series creates a grounding state for the viewer, encouraging both movement and stillness. The opportunity to work at scale, with the artwork embedded across the garden and in the galleries, brings the conversation with landscape and time to a new level.

What’s your favorite thing about the 2025 rendition of “FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth”?

There are moments of intentional and surprising juxtaposition of the screen visuals with the garden context that delight us. There is a deep relationship between the very stark, real, physical limb of a cactus or a dusty piece of desert, and this digital surface that reflects that physical world, but journeys around it spatially, reveals it through time, making it so abstracted from the real—and yet it is very much and can only be our painstaking observation of the real. There is a surprising movement of some of the garden cacti: the absorbing, swelling and sudden shooting upwards of saguaros, the dancing of cholla, the flapping, clapping, drooping and inhaling of the opuntia pads. This has been a revelation for us, but also for members of the garden team, who have stared at these exact plants often for many years.

Go to dbg.org to reserve tickets.