The rainforest is a place that dissolves the borders we construct around the self. When we look closely at the web of interconnected, symbiotic relationships sharing nutrients, light, and breath, we discover that our idea of separation between one being and the next is an illusion. In this interactive experience, digitized projections of oxygen and water vapor molecules traveling through the trees’ xylem and phloem and the subterranean mycorrhizal network are visualized in a five-second cycle—the average pace of a human breath. By synchronizing our breathing with these larger cyclical rhythms, we begin to feel the continuity between body and forest, expanding our sense of self to include the planet around us.

This digital forest is a detailed recreation of a section of the Leticia region of the Amazon rainforest in the southernmost tip of Colombia along the Amazon river. This area is home to the Ticuna people, who inhabit the wider Leticia area alongside the Witoto, Inga, Tucano, and Nukak communities who have stewarded the land for thousands of years.

A deep wisdom underpins the processes of rainforest systems, giving rise to the tightly interlinked carbon, oxygen, and water cycles that enable life all over the planet. Called “the lungs of the planet,” the Amazon rainforest produces a huge proportion of the world’s oxygen through its trees, and carries one-fifth of all the freshwater released into the Earth’s oceans every day.

Photosynthesis drives a dynamic exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen between forest and air. As trees photosynthesize, they absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen and water vapor. This dynamic is exquisitely matched to the needs of respiratory creatures: we exhale carbon dioxide and water, inhale oxygen, and eat the carbohydrates and sugars that plants store in structures such as fruits, leaves, and roots.

Rainforest trees act as powerful weather makers, drawing water up from the soil through their xylem tubes and releasing it into the sky. They make their own clouds and rain: organic compounds wafting off leaf surfaces, tree sap, and exploding fungi produce particles—called cloud condensation nuclei or “cloud seeds”—on which the trees’ exhaled water vapor condenses. This forms the river of clouds that hangs above the forest, poised to drench the vibrant ecosystem below with life-giving water. These clouds offer their waters back to the forest, and also to food crops thousands of miles away, supporting the global food supply and feeding a massive global watershed.

At Emergence Magazine’s Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London last December, Marshmallow Laser Feast premiered the immersive installation of this work: a three-channel video with 20.2-channel audio, projected on three 4.8m-wide screens. Conceived as an open-eyed meditation, the installation invited audience members to move about the space, and feel into the intricate flows of carbon, water, and oxygen within the soil, forest canopy, and air.