Marshmallow Laser Feast
Breathing withthe Forest
you can reveal a hidden layer.
you can reveal a hidden layer.
The Rainforest
presents
Breathing with the Forest
We imagine ourselves as sealed-off individuals, but we are inextricably embedded in a web of life. Our bodies are porous, suffused with the world around us, home to thousands of microscopic symbiotic inhabitants; with each breath, we exchange parts of ourselves with the wider world. Our connection with trees is particularly intimate—oxygen they exhale flows into our lungs and through our blood, coursing from the heart outward through fractal-like branching arteries to feed every cell in our bodies.
Breathing with the Forest is an experience of deep continuity and reciprocity with a Capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea) in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. Inviting us to see inside its hidden pathways, this multimedia journey brings us into relationship with the rhythmic interchange of breath that keeps the forest—and us—alive. Entering the forest, we step out of our separateness to embody something much more than human.
The Rainforest
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.
The experience’s central tree, a Capinuri (Maquira coriacea), grows throughout the forests of the Amazon river floodplain. Large-buttressed and smooth-barked, these trees can grow up to 45 meters in height, their branches emerging above the rainforest canopy layer and providing shade for the species below. Capinuri trees are valued commercially for their wood, but when left standing, they provide shelter and nourishment for creatures including capuchin monkeys, pythons, jaguars, capybaras, sloths, and owls.
In the soil below lies an intricate network of mycorrhiza—a four-hundred-million-year-old legacy of symbiotic associations between plant roots and fungi. This fine, filamentous meshwork transmits water, nutrients, and chemical signals from plant to plant, defends plants from pathogens, and filters toxins from the soil.
As part of their ongoing project of digitally preserving endangered ecosystems and the species that inhabit these fragile biomes, Marshmallow Laser Feast traveled to the Colombian Amazon to collect the data and imagery that would become this multisensory digital reconstruction.
In search of majestic trees in the Colombian Amazon
Entangled beings
Nature's cathedrals
Composer James Bulley recording the sounds of the forest
Data gathering
Scanning around the Capinuri tree
Symbiosis
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.
In growing forests, trees use the sugars produced from carbon dioxide, water, and light energy via photosynthesis as building blocks, trapping the carbon in their trunks, leaves, and soil, a process which acts as a natural “carbon sink.”
Ecologists estimate that the Amazon absorbs around 600 million tonnes of carbon per year and is presently storing over 150 billion tonnes of carbon.
As the climate warms and the dual forces of deforestation and land degradation shrink the Amazon, the forest’s ability to sequester atmospheric carbon diminishes rapidly; when forests are chopped down or catch on fire, they instead begin to add carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere, upsetting the symbiotic relationships which connect us with the living world.
Shifting Landscapes
Exhibition
Exhibition
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.
Bargehouse, London
Encountering
Trees
Trees
Breathing with the Forest brings you into an awareness of our continuity with the Amazon rainforest. This connection, while not always tangible, is ever-present. Every breath you take, every sip of water, is connected through global cycles to the Amazon rainforest.
As you move beyond this experience and back into your daily life, we encourage you to continue a practice of cyclical breathing, giving and receiving with the leafy beings with whom we share the Earth. To deepen your sense of connectedness with the trees in your own surroundings, step into Emergence Magazine’s Encountering Trees practice.
Credits
Breathing with the Forest by Marshmallow Laser Feast
Originally commissioned by Emergence Magazine
Directors:
Ersin Han Ersin, Robin McNicholas, Barnaby Steel
Executive Producers:
Alex Rowse, Eleanor (Nell) Whitley, Mike Jones, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Producer:
Lydia Entwistle, Emma Hamilton
Narrator:
Colin Salmon
Music, Sound Design and Spatialization:
James Bulley
Script:
Marshmallow Laser Feast in collaboration with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Lead Artist:
Quentin Corker-Marin
Lead Technical Artist:
Lewis Saunders
Technical Artist:
Nicolas Le Dren
Technical Producer:
Derek Rae
Producer, Amazon:
Carolina Vallejo
Ground Producers and Guides, Amazon:
Adriana Bueno, Gary Botero, Arnildo Araujo
Head of Technology:
Mike McKellar
Head of Production:
Lauren Anderson
Head of Studio:
Sarah Gamper Marconi
Behind the Scenes Capture:
Silvia Lorenzini
Information Text:
Sonnet Phelps
Digital Experience Design by Studio Airport
Development by September Digital
Art Direction:
Bram Broerse
Graphic Design:
Anže Petelinšek
Motion Design:
Bram Broerse
Hidde Meulenbeek
Developers:
Daan Meijer
Hidde Meulenbeek
Wouter den Boer
Sound Design
Julian Tjon Sack Kie
Marshmallow Laser Feast, Extended Studio
Director of Strategy:
Eleanor (Nell) Whitley
Managing Director:
Mike Jones
Executive Producer:
Carolina Vallejo
Senior Producer:
Martin Jowers
Assistant Producers:
Anya Tye, Emmanuel Adanlawo, Roxie Oliveira
Designer:
Amy Johnson
3D Designer:
Josef McGrath
Infrastructure Lead:
Andrew Robinson
Junior Backend Developer:
Maria Astakhova
Studio Assistant:
Alex McRobbie
Financial Controller:
Georgia Hines