‘Breathe in,” says Ersin Han Ersin. “Breathe out.” Look, I feel like saying, I’ve been doing this inhale-exhale malarkey for decades. But what Ersin is trying to get me to do, inside this dimly lit warehouse on the banks of the Thames, is synchronise my breath with the soundtrack to a Colombian Amazonian rainforest, or rather one that has been digitally simulated. Only then will I properly be able to enter Breathing with the Forest, a virtual reality installation created by the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective.
Ersin, its co-creative director, is urging me and my fellow visitors to transcend our individual selves, overcome species hubris, and merge with nature. We should remember that our every exhale is an airy gift to trees, who return the compliment by supplying us with oxygen that flows into our own tree-like lungs and throbs out as blood from the heart, off out to branching arteries that feed our every cell. It’s all a bit like eco yoga.
“I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching,” says Ersin, referring to the ancient Chinese philosophical text. “We had it all figured out 2,500 years ago. We realised then that the self was an illusion, that we are not individuals and are in a symbiotic relationship with nature. Somehow we forgot. It seems like a good time to make everybody remember, when we are destroying so much nature.” He has a point: Marshmallow’s installation comes just as record numbers of fossil fuel lobbyists turn Cop28 into a global oil party.
Breathing with the Forest is just one part of a mind-boggling immersive exhibition called Shifting Landscapes at London’s South Bank. As visitors enter a former warehouse, they are confronted with the sage words: “We shall not sever ourselves from the earth.” These belong to Navarre Scott Momaday, Kiowa Native American poet and memoirist. “We must chant our being and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth.”
Inside, there’s a sonic piece called The Last Nightingales. Recorded in East Sussex in May 2022 by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, it invites us to lie on the floor and hear the splendid song of a bird expected to disappear from the UK in the next 50 years. Then there’s The Pollinators of Slovenia, a video that celebrates bees at a time when their habitats are shrinking; and Poisoned Beauty, Gheorghe Popa’s drone-taken photographs of the Apuseni mountains in Romania, where waste from copper mines drenched human, bird and insect habitats in brightly coloured toxic sludge. This weekend, there will be talks entitled Seeds of Reciprocity and Mycelial Landscapes, while novelist Ben Okri will read from Tiger Work, his book exploring not just the dissolution of the world, but the possibilities emerging in its wake.
Like Okri, Ersin is optimistic. Rather than following Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking in urging that we bin off this hellscape and colonise Mars, he says Marshmallow’s VR installations, properly experienced, are antidotes to the Anthropocene, encouraging us to overcome our alienation from nature the better to make it thrive anew.
Breathing with the Forest, at the top of this warehouse, is the climax of the exhibition. It is a looped, four-minute, three-channel video with high-quality audio. With my breath synchronised to its sculpted soundscape, which every five seconds pulses with forest noises, I step into a hypnotic experience. Losing all sense of time, I soon become part of the rainforest, thanks to ambisonic field recordings, volumetric data and Lidar scans. Lidar, which stands for “light detection and ranging”, is used to digitally preserve endangered ecosystems. How telling, I think, and how ironic, that we need technological simulation to reconnect us with nature.
We sit on benches or lie on the floor admiring the triptych of pulsing life surrounding a mighty capinuri tree. And then we go underground, via a digitised rendering of the forest’s mycorrhizal network. Although the loop only lasts four minutes, Ersin hopes visitors will spend much longer experiencing the installation, lured into meditational reverie. And breathing is the key.
“The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants and elements that surround it,” writes radical ecologist David Abram in a quotation displayed outside the installation. “It continually contributes itself in turn to the air, to the composting earth, to the nourishment of insects and oak trees and squirrels … so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.”
Breathing with the Forest is an attempt to make that hidden truth evident. “As you move beyond this exhibition, back into your daily life,” says its blurb, “we encourage you to continue this cyclical breathing, giving and receiving from the gigantic leafy beings with whom we share the Earth.” I resolve to give it my best shot.
A few days earlier, I visited Marshmallow Laser Feast’s studios in east London where, for more than a decade, they’ve been on a paradoxical mission – to connect punters more closely to the natural world by immersing them in virtual ones. First, I’m given a VR headset and haptic backpack and suddenly I am in another world, one in which my real-life breathing is turned into a spray of red pixels. I begin walking through a virtual forest that becomes brighter and filled with more beautifully swirling pixels, representing moisture, photons and CO2. This experience is called We Live in an Ocean of Air and its aim is to show how breathing connects us with everything else.
Next comes Evolver, which involves me becoming a human breath making its way through the body and out into the world. It’s a strangely moving experience in which I seem to die, disintegrate and merge with both the virtual and the natural world. No wonder many visitors are found in tears when they remove their headsets. This, no doubt, is partly due to the cunningly edited, emotionally manipulative musical soundtrack, which includes pieces by Jonny Greenwood, Meredith Monk and Jon Hopkins.
It’s also down to Cate Blanchett. In Evolver and other VR experiences I enter, the Australian actor’s voice sensually intones poetic musings about our fundamental interconnectedness. After Evolver, I am invited to don headphones and eye-mask, then recline on a high-end lawn chair as sensors pump massaging pulses into my back, their intensity adjustable via a little knob on the chair arm, giving me the sensation of flight. Now I know how I want to die – with Blanchett in my ears as I ride the gently buffeting breezes like an insect on the wing. Oh nature, wild nature, finally I am at one with you.
In a sense, what Marshmallow is doing is continuing the project of dethroning humanity from its self-awarded position as centre of the universe. First Copernicus showed that the Earth rotated around the Sun and not vice versa. Then Darwin realised we are products of natural selection rather than divine plan. And Freud demonstrated that we humans were hardly as rational as we had imagined, but prone to control by unconscious impulses. Now Ersin and his team are showing something that our ancestors perhaps knew: that everything is connected. So, while our attempted separation from the natural world may allow us to better dominate and exploit it, this approach is ultimately nuts.
I was pleased to hear that another installation is called Treehugger. It aims to show headset-wearers what it’s like to be the mightiest living organism of them all – the sequoia tree. Meanwhile, In the Eyes of the Animal, an early 360 degree cinematic experiences, took visitors on a sonic and animated journey through a forest from the perspective of woodland creatures.
But then Ersin, and his co-creative directors Barney Steel and Robin McNicholas, are masters at creating the seemingly impossible: in the Netherlands right now, one of their VR experience is showing visitors what it is like to be somewhere humans can never hope to tread without being instantly spaghettified – namely, inside a black hole.
“We are limited only by our imaginations,” says Ersin. “I am an optimist. I believe we can restore the world. And I believe strongly in the plasticity of humans. I believe we can empathise with what it is like to live and die as a dragonfly or a sequoia tree. I believe we can show that we are part of nature, not different from it. Why not?”
• Breathing with the Forest features in Shifting Landscapes at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London, until 10 December. Into the Black Hole is at the Valkhof Museum Nijmegen until 19 April. Marshmallow Laser Feast: Works of Nature is also on show at ACMI, Melbourne, until 14 April.
