I recently visited Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden after learning about their latest public art installation, titled “Electric Desert”. An immersive mix of lights and sounds, Electric Desert is unlike any other light and sound show I have seen. It’s a psychedelic melange of flickering colors set to cosmic-sounding electronic music. I took hundreds of photos of the show on the night of Tuesday, December 11, 2018 and wanted to post a selection of them here to illustrate my points.

Creeping devils (Stenocereus eruca) in psychedelic lighting courtesy of Electric Desert.

The bed of creeping devil cacti (Stenocereus eruca) that resides underneath one of the DBG’s shade structures was one focus of what I deem to be perhaps most engaging art installation at Electric Desert: “Cacti Synesthesia”. The following photos show these cacti under exactly the same angle, as the photos were taken with a tripod not more than a few minutes apart. The colors are not PhotoShopped in after the fact – these are all digital snapshots of how they appeared in the light projection show. It was unreal.

How does Electric Desert/Cacti Synesthesia achieve this amazing array of color effects? I looked up some answers to that question online in an effort to find out. Apparently there is new photographic 3D digital technology that enables an advanced type of laser projection to be cast upon three-dimensional objects in a highly specific way. A complex series of 3D closeup photographs were taken of every single plant in each bed from multiple angles, and software processes those images in such as way that a given color wavelength of laser light can be focused upon each plant individually without bleeding through onto other, nearby plants. (Or the ground, rocks, etc.) It is this particular technological innovation that enables the psychedelic effect of the individual cactus stems (or agave rosettes, as photos farther down will show) having one color while the stem immediately adjacent to it has an entirely different color.

Below, I trained the tripod and camera onto several specimens of pincushion cactus in the genus Mammillaria. The webbing of different colors was chosen and designed by the artist who created Electric Desert, Ricardo Rivera. Rivera also composed the accompanying music and choreographed the sounds with the kaleidoscopic dancing colors. It took him months of work to coordinate the 3D photos and map the laser light projections onto the plants and nearby rocks and ground. Wow, what a supremely complex piece of artwork!

I like how not only are the colors bright and contrasting, but also how Rivera has left space for darkness in the scenes, where certain cacti are not lit up at all, leaving them in deep shadows just like in the photo above. And again, all of these colors and dark spaces are continually shifting and coordinated with music, so it is a whole-sensory experience that still photos cannot fully convey. It does have to be experienced live for full effect.

This bed of Queen Victoria agaves (Agave victoria-reginae) was just as impressive to me as the creeping devil cacti that I started this post with. Again, as with the crossing and tangled cactus stems, note how the closely-packed leaf rosettes exhibit little bleed-through between colors, with one color immediately adjacent to another and crisp edges. This would be impossible without sophisticated laser lights, 3D photography mapping, digital imaging, and powerful software processing capabilities. That is why I have never seen anything like it before, and why it was so striking!

Additionally, the sheer range of light colors, including odd ones like brown and black and mauve and peach, not to mention the aurora borealis-like shimmering waves migrating across the scene, all combine to create a singularly unique effect.

Some people have expressed concern over the effects that these lights might have upon the plants and any animals (including people) that might be exposed to them. DBG issued a reassurance that this issue was carefully examined before the installations were made, and that no known deleterious effects would be had since the lights are too dim and the intensity too low to have any disruptive effect upon eyesight, photosynthesis, or circadian rhythms. The lights operate for only a few hours per night and the plants experience plenty of darkness, which enables appropriate winter dormancy even if the light intensities were higher, which of course they aren’t. So we can rest reasonably well assured that the experience is entirely magical, and not medical, in nature.   😉

The multi-headed golden barrel cactus (Echinocactus grusonii) below was covered in shifting concentric rings of color. Some of the rings started as dots of color centered on the apical meristem of the plant’s heads (i.e. the middle where new spines and flower buds emerge) and migrated down the sides in widening circles like ripples on a pond. Other times the pattern reversed and the color rings moved from the ground upwards to close in a dot of color in the center. Like I said, surreal and psychedelic.

Clearly like its predecessor DBG art shows of Dale Chihuly glass sculptures in 2009 and 2013, and the LED light show “Sonoran Light” by Bruce Munro in 2015, Electric Desert is a huge hit with the public. Shows have been selling out weeks in advance, especially between the major holidays at the end of the year when it is paired with “Las Noches de Las Luminarias”, featured in another post. If you are reading this before May 12, 2019, there is still a chance to go see Electric Desert (the luminarias end on New Year’s Eve 2018) and you really should consider going to see it. It’s quite incomparable to any other art displays I’ve been privy to. Enjoy!

Note: Here’s the link to the other Desert Botanical Garden post I just published dealing more with the luminarias.

Las Noches De Las Luminarias at Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix