On Nov. 6, Desert Botanical Garden launches its first Desert Views: A Conversation Series. Join this engaging discussion exploring how technology and conservation intersect to bring FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse to life.
This month’s panel features photographer Charles Darr, Arizona State University Assistant Research Professor Chelsea Scott, and the Garden’s Research Botanist and Curator Raul Puente. Together, they’ll share insights from the yearlong process of capturing the changing rhythms of the Sonoran Desert.
Darr, one of the exhibit’s featured photographers, will also reflect on his experience traveling across the Valley, documenting the subtle yet powerful shifts in the desert landscape over time.
“Most days, we move through life under the quiet illusion that humanity exists alongside the Earth’s systems rather than within them” Darr notes.
“From October 2023 through October 2024, I spent nearly every other day returning to the same sites scattered across the desert, hours at a time, alone and removed from the built world. My assignment was to bear witness.
Desert Pulse is a portrait of place over time, revealing both the fragility and the resilience of the Sonoran Desert. To capture this change, I recorded daily high-resolution LiDAR scans and photographs that became the source material for the Garden’s immersive exhibition.
What I hadn’t expected was how quickly it became clear that I wasn’t just a visitor peering into another world. My footprints, my breath, even the sound of my movements, were all part of the system that I had been sent to observe. And just as much as I was one element within that system, observing the rest, the rest was observing me back.
I began to recognize when birds called to one another about my movement. Rabbits tracked portions of my route, keeping me in view while staying one leap from cover. Even unseen wildlife signaled their awareness with a much-appreciated rattle reminding me that ours is a shared space.
Working on Desert Pulse offered something increasingly rare in modern life: a sustained practice of mindfulness within the natural world. It reminded me that the entire biosphere is a single, integrated socio-ecological system, and everything we do is a variable in that system’s ongoing equation, each action shifting the balance one way or another.”
Event Date: Nov. 6 | Time: 5:30–7 p.m.
Purchase your tickets here
