Maja Petrić | Specimen of Time: London

Specimens of Time is a collection of immersive data-driven light sculptures, interactive installations, lenticular prints, and video works that capture the fleeting essence of nature—its light, rhythms, and memories—as it shifts beyond recognition. By fusing real-time environmental data with poetic abstraction and AI, the exhibition transforms ecological phenomena into a sensory experience that evokes presence, loss, and interconnectedness. At its core, this project serves as an act of preservation—not of physical objects, but of ephemeral atmospheres. These works strive to hold onto the ungraspable, embodying the feeling of rainforest mist, the luminosity of coral reefs, the clarity of alpine snow, and the weight of warming air. Each piece serves as a container for the irreplaceable experience of nature.

The central sculptural series—Specimens of Time: Coral Triangle, Hoh Rain Forest, Jungfrau, and Mauna Loa—utilizes live climate data to animate pedestal-mounted cubes with constantly shifting light and motion. Each sculpture serves as a living memorial, responding in real time to changes in sea temperature, air pollution, snowfall, and heat stress. Their interiors, crafted from translucent optical materials and found organic fragments, refract light into atmospheric memory fields. These are not mere representations of nature; they are its final echoes, rendered in data and light. Complementing the sculptural pieces are video works.

Specimens of Time: Burn, originally installed as an immersive installation in Seattle and now presented here as video documentation, features a suspended sculpture that dynamically translates live heat data from the Pacific Northwest rainforests into pulsating light shifts. As temperatures rise, the sculpture glows red with ecological urgency, transforming data into a red ambient signal of distress—a relic that breathes.

Specimens of Time: Rebirth, a short narrative film, envisions a world where rainforests have vanished. A lone human, preserved in cryostasis, awakens into a post-natural future. Through slow, embodied movement and atmospheric light, the film reflects on the ache of lost biophilia and the fragile potential for reconnection through memory. It positions the body as an archive and light as its language. The exhibition also explores how human experience is inseparable from nature—how we move through it, shape it, and are shaped by it. These works trace our presence as part of the natural world, not observers outside it.