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Gus Drake (1995) explores how humans and other living beings relate to their environment. His practice spans photography and immersive audiovisual installations, often focusing on changing landscapes. For Landscapes in Motion (2025–2026), Drake turned his attention to the ecological rhythms of a garden in the Dutch province of Groningen. Using machine learning, he visualized the subtle shifts that unfolded there over the course of a year. In a custom-built setup, four cameras documented the site continuously for twelve months, day and night, capturing an image every few minutes. This resulted in a dataset of more than 300,000 images, which was analysed by artificial intelligence in order to generate a time-lapse video that condenses a year of transformation into a compelling play of form, rhythm, colour and pattern.
The images reveal cycles of growth, decay and regeneration, showing how plants, insects and other organisms respond to light, weather conditions, seasonal changes, and each other. Along the bottom of the screen, environmental data recorded at the same place and time – such as wind speed and humidity – appears as an abstract counterpoint to the visual panorama.
Drake frequently collaborates with ecologists to closely map human impact on the landscape. For his work at Prospects, however, he deliberately adopts a different perspective. The garden appears as an autonomous ecosystem, in which the specific, almost enchanted quality of northern light stands out – a light that continually sets this living system in motion.
Written by Sarah van Binsbergen