Photo courtesy of the artist

What if a drawing could grow into a living ecosystem? As part of the MoMA Family Festival: Another World, an interactive augmented-reality project called Deep Field brings this vision to life. The work of artists Tin & Ed (Tin Nguyen and Edward Cutting), Deep Field invites families to reimagine how art, technology, and nature can merge to demonstrate our interconnectedness. We spoke with the artists about how the project uses augmented reality to transform children’s creativity into a means to foster collaboration, imagination, and a deeper connection to the natural world.

How did your collaboration start? And how do you approach working together?

Tin: We started working together back in university, designing a punk rock magazine. Funny enough, neither of us is particularly punk rock at all! But what brought us together was a shared love and curiosity for the natural world. We strongly believe humans are part of nature, not separate from it.

Our practice focuses on exploring how we’re connected to nature. We create immersive experiences—both physical and digital—that act as portals, revealing hidden ecologies. By bringing these elements into museums and public spaces, these works aim to remind people of the interconnected world we live in.

Can you speak about the role of augmented reality in your work? And how do you see it shaping the future of art and storytelling, especially for younger audiences?

Tin: We see augmented reality (AR) as a unique way of telling stories and highlighting things that are often invisible or inaudible. It’s like viewing the world through a lens that reveals connections we might otherwise miss—ecosystems far away, microscopic elements, or phenomena outside our sensory range.

This is particularly exciting when working with kids. With Deep Field, for example, children can create 2D drawings that transform into 3D objects within the museum space. Their creations grow out of walls, floors, and ceilings, becoming part of a shared global ecosystem of artworks. This co-creation connects kids from all over the world.

Ed: Sometimes technology can feel intimidating, so we wanted the experience to be simple and engaging for all ages—not just for kids but for parents, grandparents, and people of all ages. By incorporating drawing, it really brings people into the work and gets them to experience AR in a personal and friendly way.

Can you walk us through Deep Field and its role in the Family Festival?

Tin: Deep Field is an augmented-reality experience allowing kids from around the world to co-create a digital ecosystem. It’s been shown in places like the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Getty Museum in LA, and the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. This will be its first public showing in New York, which we’re really excited about.

The installation includes iPads for kids to use, along with soft sculptures and inflatables to create an inviting environment. Kids create botanical drawings inspired by prompts that highlight the incredible abilities and roles of plants in our ecosystem. These prompts encourage kids to think about all the specific ways that plants exist in the world, their abilities, and the different things that they’ve evolved to be able to do. I think that plants have such an important role on our planet, but we don’t appreciate it as much as we could.

Each drawing will actually grow. We map it onto three-dimensional plant structures, so it grows into a plant as seen through the iPad; the plants will start to grow out of the floors and the walls of the museum. As the kids explore the museum space, the plants start to grow there—not only plants drawn in that session, but also in other sessions in other countries. And so the work is a co-creation of an ecosystem by participants from around the world. We’ve got more than 20,000 drawings in the database now.

Ed: There’s also the sonic soundscape. The sounds have been recorded by Martyn Stewart, who has been recording sounds from nature for more than 60 years. There are more than 90,000 sounds in his collection. And we worked with him to curate the sounds for this work. And so as you walk around, you’ll be able to hear some of these sounds. We’ve chosen sounds of melting glaciers, bush fires in Australia, winds in the Sahara—these big, powerful earth sounds. But there are also sounds of living things: different kinds of bird sounds, as well as sounds that are difficult to hear now because these animals are now either endangered or extinct, or we can’t hear them with our ears. Stewart used contact microphones inside trees where you can listen to the water rushing through them, which sounds like a heartbeat. And each tree has a different rhythm that changes depending on the health of the tree.

What makes the presentation of Deep Field at MoMA unique compared to other installations of the project?

Tin: One special aspect of showing Deep Field at MoMA is the addition of a physical installation within the space designed for MoMA. Visitors will experience the work alongside elements like large rugs inspired by the Australian desert landscape, featuring patterns reminiscent of petroglyphs and fossils. There will also be soft sculptures inspired by volcanic rocks and stones, as well as a couple of large inflatable sculptures suspended in the space—hybrid creatures blending characteristics of plants, fungi, and sea animals.

What’s really beautiful about this work, for us, is that you get to imagine a world together. We’re creating together and sharing a global vision of what the world could be.

Tin Nguyen

What are the challenges and opportunities that come with developing work for children?

Tin: One challenge is ensuring that the technology feels approachable and not overwhelming. We’ve thought a lot about how we create something that allows kids of different ages to be able to use the work. The funny thing is, in creating a work that was really simple for kids to use, we inadvertently created a work that was simple for everyone. For us, technology is about finding ways to experience things that we couldn’t with our own senses, whether that be seeing the world through the eyes of a bee or a butterfly or, as with the sounds, being able to hear things that are too quiet for our ears.

Ed: We’ve seen beautiful interactions between generations, like a five-year-old teaching their grandparent how to use the technology. Once the grandparents got the hang of it, they often became just as immersed, if not more so. It’s lovely to see how people slow down, engage thoughtfully, and take care with their creations. When people are really engaging in the work, the drawings are just incredible.

How do imagination and play factor into the work?

Tin: Imagination and play are really the core of the work. Every prompt begins with the word “imagine.” I think imagination is as important to childhood development as play. What’s really beautiful about this work for us is that you get to imagine a world together. We’re creating together and sharing a global vision of what the world could be.