Deep Field 👁️🌼🌏

"Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor and to protect."—Ed Yong, Science Journalists

An interactive artwork across multiple sites including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Getty Museum and ArtScience Museum.

Imagine a tree that’s born from destruction, its seeds germinating after fire. Or a vine that shapeshifts to mimic neighboring plantlife. Imagine petals that glow and swimming seeds. A leaf that can sprout teeth. The sounds of now-gone animals and insects emerging from a forgotten time—their buzzes, chirps, hoots, and trills filling up entire rooms.

Deep Field, an interactive AR and sonic experience by artists Tin&Ed, is powered by technology, curiosity, and communal imagination. Children of all ages are invited to co-create a digital ecosystem where the real, unreal, and wondrous collide, and where invisible plant realms are revealed. Using a custom iPad Pro drawing app, participants illustrate their own fantastical plant parts. Near instantly, their creations bloom into fertile 3D plant structures, joined by others from children across the globe. Newly imagined life forms trail across the floor, and spread across the walls and ceiling. Their growth echoes the mathematical patterns that appear in nature, from fractals to the Fibonacci sequence.

Deep Field is more than an immersive virtual terrain. It transports users through eras, environments, and bodies, helping them consider the interconnectedness of living organisms. Using the app’s UV mode, they’ll perceive the world as pollinators—butterflies, bees, bioluminescent fireflies—observing the vivid UV patches on flowers that cannot be seen by humans.

A multichannel soundscape by The Listening Planet evolves and shifts as audiences move, layered with the rich, organic audio collected from endangered, extinct, and difficult-to-detect species. (The Listening Planet has one of the world’s largest natural sound collections, having captured 90,000+ sounds in 55 countries.) Layered with meteorology sounds, melting glaciers, the thrum of ant colonies, and more, the ever-changing composition ebbs and flows like earth’s ghosts, present and absent at once.

As the threat of widespread biodiversity loss looms larger than ever, Deep Field invites children to engage with forgotten worlds anew: to shift perspectives, to listen and learn, to call a wondrous future into being.