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.
I The Light is an interactive generative sculpture that records human presence as starlight. As viewers approach, their silhouettes emerge in a living constellation, gradually dissolving into the edges of the starscape. Over time, previous visitors remain faintly embedded in the system—subtle constellations drifting at the margins. The piece does not capture identity, but the resonance of being—an imprint, like footsteps in snow or breath in cold air. It transforms the ephemeral moment of presence into a cosmic echo, suggesting that we are never outside nature, only briefly visible within its field.
The Vespers lenticular print series translates this concept into static yet shifting form. As the viewer moves, these power-free prints shimmer and transform—revealing layers of time, light, and memory. Inspired by the behaviors of the light sculptures, they operate as tactile instruments of perception, reminding us that how we see is always shaped by where we stand.
Glimpse, We the Light, a video derived from I The Light, extends this constellation into digital space. Here, past presences continue to shimmer—unfolding not as documentation, but as a field of relational memory. The work is not about the individual, but about the accumulation of presence - how human beings, like stars, leave quiet trails in space and time. Together, these works propose that to remember nature is also to remember ourselves within it. They suggest that just as forests hold heat and coral carries color, we too leave imprints - momentary, luminous, and deeply entangled. Specimens of Time does not separate humanity from
environment. It offers a vision of mutual memory, where data becomes a shared breath, and light records the entanglement of all living things.
