MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST: ILLUMINATING THE HIDDEN
Illuminating the hidden natural forces that surround us, Marshmallow Laser Feast invite participants to navigate with a sensory perception beyond their daily experience. In these spaces, the known physical world is removed to reveal networks, processes and systems that are at once sublime, underpinned by research, and fundamental to life on Earth.
Their work has been exhibited internationally, including The Saatchi Gallery, London, Lisbon Triennial, Istanbul Design Biennial, New Frontiers at the Sundance Film Festival, Storyscapes at Tribeca Film Festival, The V&A and The Design Museum London.
Here Creative Director of the London based experiential collective, Barney Steel, talks us through the their adventures working at the intersection of science, art and technology.
Many of us have lost our sense of deep belonging to the earth; at some point, the earth became something that we are on, rather than in. Our artistic practice uses science and technology to immerse audiences in experiences that dissolve the illusion of separation and reveal the truth of connectedness.
As Dr Stephen Harding put it ‘We are deeply immersed in the body of the earth, just as our gut Microbes are to us, so are we to the earth.’
Our adventures in virtual reality and immersive experiences started about five years ago when we were approached by the wonderful ‘Abandon Normal Devices’ festival in partnership with the Forestry Commission, to create an artwork for Grizedale Forest in the Lake District. We created ‘In the Eyes of the Animal’ which used virtual reality and haptics (the ability to feel the virtual environment via the sense of touch, in addition to visual and aural perception) to allow participants to inhabit the perceptual systems of other expressions of life. Looking at the world from another species point of view is a great way to loosen that feeling of human superiority and open us to the wonder and diversity of other expressions of life.
Whilst exploring the forest ecosystem we began to think about our intimate connection to 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 breath in, the oxygen the trees exhale flows into our tree-like lungs, flowing from our heart outward, through fractal branching arteries to feed every cell in our body. Where does our body end and the tree begin? ‘We Live in an Ocean of Air’ explores these themes by making visible the flow of breath between participants and an ancient Sequoia forest.
We collaborate with many amazing scientists, one of which is Merlin Sheldrake (an expert in all things fungi). He very neatly explains that we are not individuals, no living thing is, every organism is a symbiosis. Seeing your own body as an ecosystem or a forest as a superorganism is a wonderful lens on the vast tissue of existence of which we are a part. (Recently Merlin planted this knowledge down for all to read in his new book: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures).
As ‘We Live in an Ocean of Air’ explores ‘out-breath’ feeding the forest, our new installation ‘The Tides Within Us’ follows the flow of ‘in-breath’. By peering under our skin we explore the tidal rhythms of oxygen flowing through the branching ecosystem of the human body. By following breath it becomes clear that you are completely reliant on the trees for the air that you breathe, and the trees wouldn’t photosynthesis without the sun. It’s by making visible these connections that remind us we are not separate from nature.
Our longterm focus is on virtual world-building and new hardware, whether VR headsets, the latest XR smartphones or glasses that can be considered as doorways or windows into those worlds. We get excited about combining our leading-edge scientific understanding of a forest ecosystem as a virtual overlay in a real forest. To see snaking rivers of air connecting you to the plants, or to peer beneath the soil into the buzzing network of the wood wide web.
Chatting with a friend Beau Lotto, he asked the question ‘what happens when you remove the headset?’. Do these immersive experiences detach you from reality, an escape, or can they reconnect you to the world around you, offering perspective shifts that change the way you feel about yourself in relationship to nature?
Some of the problems we face are the result of our consumer habits affecting ecosystems we will never visit. Can we use technology to create an intimate, deep connection with these distant places? We think that the experiments we are doing now might scale to have a big impact in a future where immersive technology is in the hands of billions of people.
Looking to future trends it’s easy to see how physical and digital objects will co-exist simultaneously. You can look at 3D rendered visual effects to understand what is around the corner for realtime systems. Already realtime tracking systems allow quick and easy face swops on mobile devices and the trajectory of this will allow for a realistic embodiment of trees or mycelium (the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony) in virtual or mixed reality worlds.
I was once asked ‘What does an apple taste like?’ Its tangy, fruity, crisp… no words can get close to the richness of the taste of an apple! Potentially as technology gets better at hacking our senses we will be able to simulate something close to the richness of the full spectrum of our senses. It is interesting to consider immersive storytelling that goes beyond the limits of language.
MLF is a network of specialists branching out through freelancers and collaborators worldwide. Being based in the UK we benefit from funding opportunities that allow us to experiment.
This space to play encourages happy accidents, the seeds that later flower into globally touring exhibitions.
In an article about David Hinton’s book ‘Existence’, writer Peter Reason writes: ‘Hinton’s book suggests that the job of the artist is to reinvigorate a sense of wonder. He challenges us to experience our art as existence-tissue describing, understanding, celebrating itself through us as it emerges into presence and retreats into absence. Surely this is central to any art practice that wishes to be relevant to these times of astonishing beauty and loss?’ This sentiment resonates and is essential for artists to have the space to explore. We should be nurturing open minds, creative thinking and collaboration to deal with the coming challenges ahead.
