Christopher Allen reviews ACMI’s Marshmallow Laser Feast

A London-based collective’s video animations awaken viewers to the act of breathing and our existence with nature

Evolver by Marshmallow Laser Feast, Works of Nature, ACMI, 2023, image by Eugene Hyland

Breath is life; we take our first breath as we enter the world, and when, after many decades of uninterrupted inhalation and exhalation, we finally stop, life comes to an end. We expire, we breathe our last. We “give up the ghost”; in many cultures breath is equated with soul, and this is also understood as the moment it leaves the body.

All languages have words for breath that recognise its deeper implications. Thus in Latin “spiritus” is breath before it is spirit or soul; “anima” too can mean breath or even breeze as well as soul; the Greek “pneuma” means both breath and spirit; the Sanskrit “prana” is breath but also the principle of life itself, like the Chinese “chi” (in classical Chinese landscapes clouds are imagined as the chi of the mountains they surround).

Although breath is an autonomic and involuntary action of the body, it is also one that we can learn to control. It is in fact the only autonomic process of the body that we can directly modify, but through it we can indirectly affect the functioning of other corporeal ­processes.

A colleague recently told me that in the middle of a meeting that he was finding quite stressful, his smartwatch suddenly alerted him that his heartbeat was too fast and that he should do some breathing exercises. We cannot slow down our heartbeat merely by willing it, but we can achieve that result by slowing our breathing, making it longer and more regular; in the same way stress produces short shallow breathing, but can be mitigated by taking conscious control of the breath. This is the basis of the ancient Indian practice of Pranayama, which is one of the foundations of yoga. It includes many specific exercises and breathing patterns, but the ultimate aim of all of them is to achieve a slow, steady, subtle breath which helps to maintain clarity and serenity of mind. For the same reason, breath practice is a foundation of any kind of meditation; the mind cannot be still unless breathing is steady, and focusing the mind on the cycle of breath is one of the simplest ways to discourage it from wandering into distraction.

This subject has attracted a lot of attention recently. During the Covid pandemic, James Nestor’s book Breath: the new science of a lost art (2020) became a New York Times bestseller and according to Wikipedia, had already by 2022 been translated into 35 languages. The Dutch athlete Wim Hof teaches a particular form of breath control, and one instructional video on YouTube has been watched more than 80 million times. There are countless other YouTube videos, talks and podcasts on breath control, breathing techniques for athletes and breath-holding sports such as freediving.

None of this sounds like the sort of thing a group calling itself Marshmallow Laser Feast would be concerned with, but the name is presumably ironic and even facetious, since gorging on hyperprocessed sugary junkfood represents the antithesis of the ethos evident in this series of installations and videos. In fact the work is entirely about breath and breathing as processes connecting humans to the natural world and to the cosmos itself.

Visitors first encounter a spectacular video installation – projected in full life-size on a whole wall – of a giant and ancient kapok tree originally photographed and filmed during a research visit to the Amazon jungle; a separate didactic display at the end of the exhibition shows how this was done, and the multiple high-resolution pictures that were taken of the original tree before being processed by complex digital programs.

Depending on the moment that we enter the installation, we may see before us what looks like a dramatic video image of a magnificent ancient tree; but then it begins to move and crawl with life and soon the whole tree has been deconstructed into lines of energy streaming up and down the trunk and reaching out into its branches and down into its roots. It is no longer an object, but a living system, a network and process of life.

The choice of an artistic medium should always be motivated by the nature of what is to be expressed or articulated; there should always be a reason to choose oil or watercolour, or to draw in charcoal, red chalk or ink and brush. In the same way, new technologies, which can sometimes be adopted arbitrarily or because they are new, are most effectively employed to deal with or reveal something that cannot be adequately represented in any other way.

In this case, the digital processing and animation of the original photographic material allows the artists to reveal something that would be hard to convey in any other medium: the sense that trees and other living things around us are not inert objects, but entities in a constant state of inner movement and change, even if those interior processes are normally invisible to us and the outer manifestations of growth are too gradual for us to apprehend.

After this, visitors are led into a space set apart behind a curtain for a guided meditation. There is a short wait for the previous session to finish, then all file into the space, find a seat on one of the cushions or bean bags strewn around the floor, and pick up a set of headphones hanging nearby. This is not an ideal arrangement for meditation, for while an upright posture and a straight back foster a corresponding mental state of attention and focus, sprawling on a beanbag encourages instead a state of inattention and mental drifting. It would be preferable to sit on the small Japanese meditation cushions called zafu or, for the more austere, on a Yoga brick.

But the meditation script provided, read by Cate Blanchett, is even more unfavourable to the stillness of meditation. It is well-meaning and we can sympathise with the intention, but it is very hard to write about the ideas and sentiments it expresses without slipping into kitsch and bathos, and that ends up being relentlessly grating. It would be better to begin with the briefest of explanations or instructions, and then perhaps a minute or so of guidance for the pace of inhaling and exhaling, leaving the rest of the time to silence or a minimal musical track. The remainder of the exhibition seeks to demonstrate and help the visitor experience the cycles that form the life of the natural world, on which we as humans fundamentally depend for our very existence and in which we are inextricably involved.

The first of these is the cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide. We all know about this in principle, or learn about it at school, but there is a gulf between knowing something theoretically and being actively aware of it or pondering its consequences. Trees and other flora do not just replenish the atmosphere we breathe, they have created it in the first place; animal life, which requires oxygen, could not arise until plant life had produced the atmosphere that surrounds us today.

Our relationship with trees is thus strictly symbiotic; there is nothing sentimental about trying to preserve forests, resist excessive land clearing or replant barren lands. Even in cities we know that air quality is better in streets lined with trees than in those that lack them. And yet this is still only considering the matter from a purely utilitarian point of view. The exhibition invites us to ponder the more metaphysical question of the continuity between the life-processes of a tree’s cells and our own; as one label asks, where does this tree really end and we begin in what is really a continuous cycle like that of inhalation and exhalation itself?

A second aspect of the question is introduced with the role of trees and other flora in the production of energy in a form that can sustain our physical life. When trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the process is powered by the energy of the sun, which is then turned into carbon in the tree – as in the timber which can be burnt, or turned into charcoal or eventually fossilised into coal or oil – or, in a form that can directly nourish our bodies, carbohydrates. The life cycle of the tree thus not only provides the oxygen that we breathe but in the same process turns the energy of the sun into a form that can be assimilated by the human body.

The group’s thinking and its approach to communicating understanding to its audience is the subject of several wall panels in the exhibition, one of which reads: “Humanity’s dependence on the natural world is absolute, from the food we eat, (to) the water we drink and the air we breathe.

The protection of regeneration of ecosystems is fundamental to our collective futures. But statistics and facts do little to change behaviours, develop new perspectives or create new stories. Marshmallow Laser Feast confronts this issue through awe-inspiring experiences and artworks, revealing a global system that intimately ties all the natural world into a wondrous rhythm that underpins life on Earth.”

Accordingly, much of the middle part of the exhibition is made up of immersive environments that are designed to convey and allow the viewer to participate in a sense of belonging to a boundless and endless cycle of living processes. Skeins of colour, cascading dots and erupting forms surround us on walls and ceilings; but even though visitors are submerged in this amorphous and dynamic visual environment, it is unclear whether they would have any idea what is going on without reading the wall panels.

That is why the most effective part of the exhibition is the animation of the tree which opens our journey through the underground spaces at ACMI, and fortunately it closes with another such animation, this time of an immense redwood from California. The animation here is somewhat different in style but similar in general process and meaning. Again we watch the tree as we may first see it, simply as a living thing but nonetheless as a kind of object, turn instead into a living being whose inner dynamism is made vividly real.

Unlike later thinkers, Aristotle recognised three kinds of soul, “anima” in Latin or “psyche” in the original Greek; if only humans have a rational soul, animals have a sensitive one which allows for sense-perception and movement, and plants a vegetative one, which explains their capacity for growth. Humans, whose rational soul allows them to understand this natural world, underestimate the power of the vegetative soul because its action is so slow in comparison with our capacity for attention. One thing these animations achieve is to reveal the explosive dynamism of organic growth by removing this purely relative impediment in the human understanding of our environment.

Marshmallow Laser Feast

ACMI to April 14