Marshmallow Laser Feast — the London studio behind We Live in an Ocean of Air and Evolver, whose whole practice is making invisible living systems perceptible — opened a new large-scale immersive installation this summer. Mycelial renders the fungal network beneath a forest floor: the “wood wide web” of mycorrhizal threads that trade nutrients and chemical signals between trees, reimagined as a navigable environment of light and spatial sound that a visitor walks bodily through, with the network responding to their presence and movement.
Watch: An Introduction to Marshmallow Laser Feast (Factory International) (YouTube)
Making the invisible into a place you can enter
MLF’s central move has never been spectacle for its own sake; it’s taking a real scientific system too small, too slow, or too hidden to perceive, and giving it a scale and a tempo a human body can inhabit. Mycelial takes the underground fungal network — a system we know is there, exchanging resources across an entire forest, but can never witness — and renders its flows and pulses as something you move through. The point is empathetic as much as aesthetic: to make a viewer feel, viscerally, that a forest is a single connected organism rather than a collection of separate trees.
Presence-driven, not pre-rendered
The installation reads visitors and lets their movement ripple through the network — approach a node and signals propagate outward, cluster together and the density shifts. That responsiveness is what separates MLF’s work from a beautiful projected film: the environment is a real-time system reacting to the people inside it, so no two walk-throughs trace the same path of light. It’s the same reactive-installation craft this site has tracked from teamLab to Meow Wolf, applied here to the specific, quietly radical subject of forest ecology.