Over the first four months of Covid lockdown, Andrew recorded a timelapse of a forest leafing out in upstate New York.

Forests generate almost a third of earth’s oxygen. They enable us to breathe, and they’re home to a vast majority of life on Earth. They’re a community that speaks to each other, shares sunlight, and directs nutrients to those most in need.

Three years after the recording, Andrew recovered the tape, and with the perspective after lockdown, became very interested in the meaning it held.

When he reviewed the recording in timelapse, the trees moved frenetically, mirroring the panic of that Spring. The team deployed an AI frame-interpolation tool to smooth out the footage and create a sense of fluidity.

This collaboration with a technical tool enabled a new expression of a core phenomena of the pandemic, moving from a frenetic, chaotic feeling to an expression of breath. This led to an insight that the period of Covid lockdown was fundamentally related to breath, and the film seemed intuitively linked to a time where everyone distanced themselves to protect each other’s respiratory systems.

This film is an example of how our relationship to planetary systems is often mediated through technology, which can be used as means to see beyond a singular perspective, problematize that perspective, and resolve it.