FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse
OPEN October 2025 - May 2026
FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse is an ambitious artwork commissioned by Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. The long-form exhibition opens October 2025 (through May 2026) with four large-scale, digital installations nestled amongst the cacti-filled garden and exhibitions in two newly built contemporary gallery spaces.
"We invite you to see and feel this desert city in a way that is impossible with traditional cameras or with your 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 colourful exuberance."
​
In collaboration with Pascal Wyse, I provided sound design for these remarkable displays. I designed immersive soundscapes that blend musicality with subtle glitch textures, reflecting both the natural rhythms of the desert and the data-driven aesthetic of the timelapse visuals. By layering organic sonic elements with carefully manipulated, glitch-inspired sounds, the audio complements the evolving landscapes while reinforcing the intricate, almost digital patterns revealed in the scans.
Photo credit: ScanLAB Projects
Heeley People's Park: An Aural History
Frauke Behrendt defines ‘placed sound’ as “the distribution of sounds in (outdoor) spaces” using GPS to soundtrack participants' trajectory according to their specific location. Located in Heeley, Sheffield, this placed sound experience is designed to allow three generations of a local family to guide participants through the woods and open green spaces of Heeley People's Park. Albert will share its past; a housing estate with neighbouring forests, streams and infrastructure. Andy will describe how his community Trust found it - derelict and grassed over following the estate’s demolition to make room for a dual carriageway that was never built - and the process of its development into the park seen here today. Ollie will highlight its importance to his and future generations.
​With direct and personal connections to the site, and unique perspectives spanning three generations, Albert, Andy and Ollie have each been interviewed on location. These ethnographic interviews are intended to reflect the history of the site, and their sensory experiences within it. In this way, participants can gain direct insight into eight decades of an evolving landscape, and the dramatic changes undergone. Field recordings captured in and around the park have been layered to reflect the dialogue, and processed to create an immersive experience which fluctuates between naturalistic and musical. Listen as trains that would once have stopped at the now defunct Heeley Railway Station, evolve into percussive instrumentation. Birdsong, church bells, squeaky swings and more transform into melodies, while tonal drones are formed from the sounds of a running stream that once ran through Heeley. Hear the intrusive noise of traffic, now so prevalent to this landscape, as they literally distort and degrade the peaceful sounds of nature.
​
This audio augmented reality is intended to reflect the unique and turbulent history of the landscape, and the sensory experience of those within it. Over time, this experience has changed with the shift from dereliction to greenery, from trains to cars, and from community, to consternation and (hopefully) back again. 'Heeley People's Park: An Aural History' offers site-specific discourse on these changes.
Listen here:
Experience here:
