The artist creates immersive installations that bring typically overlooked or endangered ecosystems to life in virtual simulations. The Ephemeral Lake explores California’s Mojave Desert, where temporary lakes appear only under rare climatic conditions and quickly vanish. These ephemeral waters form in desert playas during unusually wet periods, creating unique habitats for microorganisms and plants that survive in these fleeting aquatic environments.

The artwork is a living instrument in which life emerges and vanishes in a real-time simulated world and a generative musical composition. Using 3D animation, interactive glass sculptures and experimental sound (by Okkyung Lee), the artist created two interconnected worlds: a crystalline surface reflecting water and salt fields, and humid underground limestone caves with pulsating energy at their core.

Inspired by Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the installation revives the 19^th-century tradition of wilderness as both an external landscape and an internal emotional experience. Wild Romanticism emphasised the fusion of external manifestations (wild spaces) and internal states (wild imagination), constructing a dynamic relationship between human perception and the natural environment.

This work represents a post-humanist approach by dissolving boundaries between human beings and nature, the virtual and the physical, fact and fiction. Through multi-sensory immersion, visitors experience the desert not as distant observers but as interconnected participants in its ecosystem. The installation challenges our separation from nature, providing new ways to understand our relationship with threatened environments in the age of climate change.

(Barnabás Bencsik)