Art and data converge in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert

“Desert Pulse,” an art installation at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, is a multi-sensory immersion featuring time-lapse imagery of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert – a landscape pulsing with life. Lee Cowan talks with U.K. architects Matt Shaw and Will Trossell, who brought a 3-D LIDAR scanner (a tool used in surveying) to the desert to capture tens of millions of data points, which ScanLAB Projects converted into vibrant digital evocations of an ecosystem breathing, growing, and retreating.