Award-winning creative studio ScanLAB Projects is exhibiting the World Premiere of immersive art installation, FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth, as part of the prestigious Venice Immersive section at La Biennale di Venezia’s International Film Festival 2022.
FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth is a contemplative artwork, a research tool and a shared immersive experience where audiences bear witness to environmental change. They explore the multi-screen installation showcasing a novel form of 3D time-lapse cinema synchronized and syncopated across screens, encountering a spatial and temporal shift on Earth that’s impossible to see directly with the human eye or through the lens of traditional cameras.
To achieve this impact, ScanLAB spent two years documenting the British countryside and urban cityscape in millimeter-precise 3D time-lapse detail, and then interrogated the results in the form of meditative films designed for large-scale spatial viewing.
We want our audiences to get lost inside these beautiful datasets, to be overwhelmed by the catastrophic retreat of an entire cliff in front of them, and to follow the movement of a single pebble on the beach beneath their feet.
Matthew Shaw, co-founder of ScanLAB
In this era of climate crisis and extreme consumerism, audiences are invited to bear witness to environmental change in a novel way that invites personal shifts. The artwork reveals landscape alterations caused by human-centred industry and the immense forces of nature; destruction, extraction, habitation, construction, harvests, growth, and erosion. Three-dimensional stories unfold across an array of screens, scored by a powerful soundscape. FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth is a multi-disciplinary experience explicitly created with principles of architecture, theatre, music and mindfulness. It invites you to observe in another way. To think and feel in another time scale: geological time, seasonal time, tidal time. To contemplate change, and the pace of change. We have created space where your perspective might shift.
FRAMERATE is fundamentally about change, which is global, personal and challenging. There is so much anxiety when we consider climate change and our environmental future – so we’ve created a place where people can think deeply and calmly about what’s coming. It’s a gentle place that helps open our mindset so we can focus on hopeful change – in our minds, our lives, and our personal impact.
William Trossell, co-founder of ScanLAB
In addition to its merit as an artwork, the data collected and presented by FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth is ground-breaking scientific research, containing empirical, measurable facts. It began as a pioneering Audience of the Future research project funded by Innovate UK. The results of this R&D are being used by researchers from universities and institutes across the UK including ongoing collaborative research with the British Geological Survey, with first papers and publicly accessible data sets currently in peer review.
Reflecting and deepening the studio’s relationship to sustainability is central to the core artistic vision and message of FRAMERATE. As part of the work, ScanLAB examined the environmental impacts of the production of FRAMERATE and the general studio practice. ScanLAB has created policies and tools to monitor project impact and foreground mindful decision-making across the studio. Results include a 70% reduction in the emissions in the 2021 on location FRAMERATE data capture in Glasgow, as well as publishing our policies, tracking tools, our first annual report and case studies for other studios to study and adapt.
The presentation of FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth at Venice is supported by the Simons Foundation. Research & Development was supported by Innovate UK’s Audience of the Future Program.
