Into the Tree, Into the Breath: Marshmallow Laser Feast and Screens That Gather the Body

On the western edge of London, on the lawns of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a gate of light six metres high is standing. Come closer and you realise that it is a single oak. Not, however, a real tree in front of you. One ageing oak that actually grows in the gardens has been captured whole in three dimensions by photogrammetry and laser scanning, and its interior rebuilt inside an enormous LED. Stand before the screen as though passing through a gate and you see the flow of water and nutrients climbing beneath the bark, and the roots spread underground branching out into the soil. What happens inside a single tree, never ordinarily visible, is opened here as light at the scale of a city.

Of the Oak (2025) is the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast (hereafter MLF), an artist collective based in London. Their work turns, almost without exception, around a single subject. Making what cannot be seen into something the body can feel. The flow of water inside a tree, the journey oxygen takes through human lungs, the echolocation of whales, the breath exchanged between the atmosphere, plants and people — processes that had existed only inside instruments and data are translated, by screen and sound and vibration, into an experience that several people can attend at once. This essay reads the collective not as a lineage of "screens placed in the city" but as one of "screens that gather the body".

A Method Born in a Forest

The prototype of MLF's methodology lies not in a single gate but in a forest.

In 2015 they presented In the Eyes of the Animal in Grizedale Forest, in Cumbria in the UK. It was a joint commission from the Manchester-based arts organisation Abandon Normal Devices and Forest Art Works of Forestry Commission England, made as part of AND Festival 2015. The visitor puts on a headset, straps to their back a haptic device that transmits low frequencies (a Subpac), and stands in an actual forest. Then, by "borrowing" in turn the perceptual worlds — the Umwelt — of four creatures, a mosquito, a dragonfly, a frog and finally an owl, they experience the woodland.

Everything that would run through MLF's later work is already assembled in this early piece. Recording an existing natural environment exhaustively, with drones and 360° cameras, laser scanning and photogrammetry. Recomposing that data into a viewpoint other than everyday human perception. And binding together not only sight but sound (spatial audio from binaural recording) and touch (vibration), so that the whole body receives it. Where a camera captures "a scene that is already there", what MLF handles is a scene reassembled out of measurement data, one that ordinarily meets no one's eye. On this single point, their screens differ from photography and from film alike.

A Collective That Makes the Unseen Felt

MLF was formed in London in 2011. At its core are three artist-directors — Robin McNicholas, Barnaby Steel and Ersin Han Ersin — who work as a collective that also includes the executive producer Nell Whitley. Moving across immersive installation, XR, moving image and performance, they have held to one consistent interest: bridging the findings of the natural sciences into art. To borrow their own words, the work is an attempt to "deepen our understanding of and connection with the world around us" through creative technology, and to remind the viewer that "we are just one species in a shared ecosystem".

This viewpoint — that we are "just one species" — is why MLF's screens stand somewhere altogether different from advertising signage. Most large urban screens hold a product out to each passer-by, one by one. The gaze is broken down into individuals, and the screen becomes a device that bundles countless one-to-one relationships together. MLF's screens go the other way. They place the human being back inside a larger system, as something continuous with other creatures, with the atmosphere, with trees. That is precisely why their works are designed not as a monitor to be peered into alone but as a "place" where several bodies gather in one space to be present.

One of the high points of this is We Live in an Ocean of Air, shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London from the end of 2018 into 2019. Staged around an enormous sequoia, the visitor wears a breathing sensor and a VR headset and experiences the invisible circulation of breath between plants and people: the breath they exhale is drawn into the tree, and the oxygen the tree exhales returns to them. The run was extended twice, and across six months it sold out 28,000 tickets. It was also a work that proved, at an early stage, that an immersive art exhibition can make a single museum room stand up as box office.

The Journey of Oxygen, the Whale's Inner Ocean

The work in which MLF took up the "invisible circulation" at its largest scale is Evolver (2022). Air drawn in through the mouth whirls like a tornado in the lungs, passes through the heart, and travels the network of river and tributary that is the bloodstream — the journey a single breath of oxygen makes through the body, drawn across several formats: VR and large-scale screen installation. The narration is by Cate Blanchett; the music by Jonny Greenwood, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Jon Hopkins and Meredith Monk. Edward R. Pressman and the film director Terrence Malick are credited among the executive producers, and the work was presented at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival.

This line-up of actors and composers is not merely a way of generating talk. MLF's works come into being only when sight, sound, touch and space are woven together inseparably. Voice and score are not appendages to the screen but media of equal standing, there to draw the body into the work. In contrast to the urban signage this journal has treated in earlier issues, which has had to face the constraint of "not being able to make sound" amid ordinances and crowds, MLF prepares from the outset an enclosed space of its own, premised on sound and vibration. Rather than pushing out into the street, they build a vessel for immersion inside the city — this is the position they have chosen.

In recent works the subject has widened further. Works of Nature, the solo exhibition held at ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in Melbourne from 2023 into 2024, was a survey that gathered in one place Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, which raises a giant Colombian kapok as a five-metre moving image, the oxygen journey of Evolver, the atmospheric circulation of We Live in an Ocean of Air, and others. And in Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale (2024), the subject is the echolocation of the sperm whale — the sense of "seeing" the world by sound — an attempt to make visible a mode of perception that human sight can never reach.

When a Screen Becomes a Gathering

There is a reason this journal places MLF's screens in the lineage of kai (会), the gathering.

Their screens are not surfaces that distribute information. They are devices for gathering several bodies around one invisible process. People standing in a forest with headsets on; people sharing the VR of a giant tree, their breathing brought into step; people stopping before a six-metre oaken gate and looking up together at the flow beneath the bark — the work comes into being only where people have gathered and are present in that place with their bodies. Played back automatically in the small hours with no one there, Of the Oak and Evolver do not hold their proper meaning. That people gather, and that their bodies are in that place, is a structural condition of the work. In this respect MLF's screens are constituted quite differently, at root, from the city's advertising surfaces, which keep turning on the premise of the viewer's absence.

Here I want to draw in two concepts as guide lines: ma (間), the interval, and tenkei, the point that brings a landscape to life. Where the city's advertising surfaces work in the direction of filling space up, what MLF does first is to open a blank within everyday perception. The eye of a mosquito, the journey of oxygen, the echo of a whale — for processes that ordinarily lie outside consciousness, they make on the body's side a ma, an interval in which to receive them. And what rises in that opened place is a single tree, a single breath. It is not a vast structure occupying the landscape; like the small boat or the traveller brushed into an ink-wash painting, it functions as a single point set down within a larger system. Through that point, a person notices that they are part of a larger ecosystem. To gather bodies before what cannot be seen, and to kindle a small meaning there — MLF's screens can be read as a translation of this old spatial aesthetic into the contemporary vessel of immersion.

This journal has so far traced screens integrated into the fabric of the city, and distribution networks that circle it. What MLF shows is a third position, different from either. Neither pushing the screen out into the street nor dispersing it across several sites, but building, inside one enclosed space, a vessel of immersion in which bodies gather. Even within the lineage of immersive studios that make space itself the work, MLF's singularity lies in the fact that this vessel is always opened toward "the invisible processes of nature". Put against the question raised by the organisation behind this journal — to make a museum of the world — making a museum of the city does not necessarily mean adding more screens to its streets. It means kindling, within the landscape, single points before which a person stops and attends with their whole body. MLF's oaken gate is one of the quietest answers to that.

Sources

1. fig.001Of the Oak — Marshmallow Laser Feast (artist official)(2025)
2. [2]Of the Oak — Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (commissioner official)
3. fig.002In the Eyes of the Animal — Marshmallow Laser Feast (artist official)(2015)
4. fig.003Evolver — Marshmallow Laser Feast (artist official)(2022)
5. fig.004Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale — Marshmallow Laser Feast / bitforms gallery(2024)
6. [6]Marshmallow Laser Feast: Works of Nature — ACMI (2023–2024)
7. [7]We Live in an Ocean of Air — Marshmallow Laser Feast (artist official)
8. [8]Marshmallow Laser Feast — bitforms gallery (biography)