High-Tech Comes to Phoenix' Desert Botanical Garden in New Exhibition
By Chadd Scott on
Deserts are typically subtle, quiet, slow. They don’t rush and boom and soar with the power and obvious grandeur of waterfalls and mountains and forests leading to assumptions they’re baren, boring.
Nothing could be further from the truth. People may well be divided into two categories: those who can “see” the desert and its splendor, and those who never give it a second glance.
Artists “see” the desert. Maynard Dixon saw it. Georgia O’Keeffe saw it. Ed Mell saw it.
The UK-based artist-led studio ScanLAB Projects is helping people see the desert for its subtle spectacle from October 11, 2025, through May 10, 2026, at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix during “FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse,” a site-specific exhibition documenting daily changes in the landscape of the Sonoran Desert.
The project merges art, technology, and environmental research to bear witness to the desert ecology, whilst illuminating the landscape’s beauty and fragility. The exhibition marks the latest installment in Desert Botanical Garden's prestigious bi-annual art exhibition series, following Dale Chihuly (2021) and Fernando Botero (2023).
ScanLAB 'Desert Pulse' Installation Rendering for Desert Botanical Garden, Horizon Imprint. Courtesy ScanLAB Projects.
High-Tech Comes to the Desert
“Desert Pulse” continues ScanLAB’s acclaimed FRAMERATE series using a proprietary process of time-lapse 3D scanning and photography using state of the art LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology. LiDAR allows for the incredibly accurate scanning and mapping of large scale environments through the use of laser beams emitted and received akin to how bats “see” with sound waves. The technology was used by Apollo 15 astronauts to map the surface of the moon.
LiDAR scans in 360-degrees across wide fields of visions, 2,000 feet across. For measuring and scanning large spaces, huge outdoor spaces, environments, it’s aces. Understandably, the process takes time. Ten minutes or more to complete an image. Too much time to capture motion.
ScanLAB was interested in motion. Movement in the environment. Tides, seasons, plants blooming.
Advances in smart device technology on a small scale sacrificed the scale of LiDAR, but allowed for movement.
“Could we invent our own instrument and process to record landscapes through time,” ScanLAB Projects co-founder William Trossell wondered.
They could.
Their innovation became FRAMERATE and the studio has used it to document former concentration camps, melting arctic ice, and the motion of dancers, creating dynamic artworks and fact-based datasets utilized for scientific papers, climate activism, and journalism. A previous project shown at SXSW (Austin’s South by Southwest festival) is where Desert Botanical Garden officials became turned on to their work.
Blending photography, motion and sound, “FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse” reveals subtle, daily changes in desert ecosystems recorded over a full 12-month period, awakening a deeper appreciation of the Sonoran Desert.
ScanLAB 'Desert Pulse' 'Echinocereus Rigidissimus.' Courtesy ScanLAB Projects.
‘Desert Pulse’
“FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse” is the result of a three-year collaboration between ScanLAB Projects and Phoenix-based photographers, Garden scientists and researchers, curators and journalists. In October 2023, five local photographers joined the Desert Pulse team, expanding their practices into 3D scanning as they documented the desert daily for a full year.
Installed throughout the Garden’s cactus-filled landscape, the exhibition features four large-scale spatialized screen installations paired with an indoor multi-screen exhibition, launching the Garden’s new The RAF Exhibit gallery spaces. Inside, custom-designed, high-fidelity OLED screen sculptures act as portals into dynamically changing environments. Woven throughout, sonic landscapes by sound designer and composer Pascal Wyse amplify and reflect the visuals.
“My British landscape understanding is that there are big swings of seasons,” Trossell said. “Suddenly, there are beautiful, lush forests of deciduous trees, and then we go back to winter of bare plants and leaf litter, and the seasons are distinct. I saw the desert as quite still, quite stoic, but actually, it's proven to be just as life-like and subtle.”
Back in London, the artists engineered robotic camera rigs housed in climate-controlled chambers, precisely capturing the unfurling of every cactus petal and spine. ScanLAB had hoped to travel the equipment to Phoenix, ultimately finding it too cumbersome and expensive. The team used a Chelsea Flower Show award-winning nursery in South London to source cacti and succulents coming into bloom for imaging.
Revealed are environmental changes invisible to the naked eye: landscapes in flux along the Salt River, flowering cactus, heliotropic (sun seeking) turning of desert plants, regrowth after fire, irrigation and harvest of fields.
ScanLAB 'Desert Pulse,' 'One Giant Saguaro.' Courtesy ScanLAB Projects.
“The exhibit will dispel the often-misconceived image of deserts as empty or barren,” Desert Botanical Garden’s Chief Experience Officer Elaine McGinn wrote. “Visitors will experience a world that brims with life that has evolved to flourish in extremes. ‘Desert Pulse’ captures the dualities of the desert – fragility and strength, isolation and communion, desolation and beauty. Each frame of the artwork aims to explore the resilience, minimalism, and quiet grandeur of desert ecosystems.”
“Desert Pulse” even features a landfill. On the outskirts of Phoenix, a quarry site used to mine gravel for road and building construction across the city is now being filled in with demolition rubble. The locale intrigued ScanLAB.
“I want people to take away from this exhibit a renewed joy of the desert. I know now that those incredible Sonoran saguaros, those beautiful, tall, majestic cacti, aren't static. They have their own rhythms and pulses,” Trossell said. “This is an artwork about change. We’re increasingly seeing a lot of change, whether that's across our environment and climate change, or in the political sphere. Everything is changing rapidly and seemingly increasingly. This is a lovely, gentle, reflective, meditative moment for people to come and enjoy and think and take time out of that moment and go away, hopefully, with a renewed sense of understanding of the natural and human world.”
