A trip through the body and beyond

Saturday, 22 November 2025

Have you ever felt slightly out of sync with the world around you ‒ with the pulse of the planet, the quiet systems that sustain life, or even your own breath?

A virtual reality odyssey by London-based artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast aims to draw people back into that rhythm. Guided by the soothing, almost meditative voice of actor Cate Blanchett, the experience uses technology to help people turn inward and reconnect with the living forces that surround and inhabit us.

Part of Te Papa’s ticketed, major summer exhibition Breathe | Mauri Ora, The Post was invited to be among the first to try the 25-minute wireless headset experience. Offered as an optional, extra-cost addition to the show, the VR work sits alongside sweeping, shifting wall projections that comprise the bulk of the exhibition.

Mark Olliver, Te Papa’s technology solutions systems engineer, worked alongside the Australian national museum of screen culture to adapt the collective’s audiovisual designs for the museum’s gallery space. He’s responsible for ensuring the experience flows seamlessly ‒ right down to the use of more than 90 speakers that will work to create an immersive soundscape.

While traditional museum experiences invite groups of people to stand collectively before artworks, the VR component ushers visitors into a solitary, highly personal encounter. The entire exhibition is “meant to slow people down”, Olliver said in an interview. “It has made me remember to slow down and think how important my breath is ‒ that every breath is a gift.”

What the experience feels like, as best as words allow

Sitting on a 360-degree swivel chair, the headset is lowered and Blanchett’s voice opens the experience. Suspended somewhere in space-time, floating in light, the first thing trippers will notice is a bloom of granular, blue-white cells: little shimmering specks of matter or being, pulsing out from nowhere and then gently drifting over, under and straight through you.

At first the matter flows in a single, lustrous stream ‒ but soon other tendrils curl into view, with twisting helixes approaching from all directions. Blanchett’s voice dissolves into an enveloping, alpha wave-type frequency as the streams thicken, multiply and spiral into new shapes, sizes and colours.

It’s now darker. The hundreds of thousands of particles quickly become millions, then something beyond counting ‒ a torrent of rivers all around. From every angle and perspective there is hypnotic swaying activity and motion, like forests of giant kelp bobbing in the deep blue, or currents of blood surging through veins.

All at once you are the oxygen and the cells it nourishes: first in an amorphous organism and later, unmistakably, within a human body. Swirling through the lungs and then into the percussive drum of a heartbeat, the experience builds to its crescendo when, having surfed through a series of complex vascular systems, the tripper finally rises above the figure it has been inhabiting.

Then Blanchett’s voice returns, bringing you out of the currents and up into the air, or nothingness, or everything. Almost incomprehensibly, the particles that carried you through the body rearrange into cosmic constellations, like shifting stars in an endless sky.

Moving towards the sun, a faraway galaxy, or something indescribable, the cells give way again to an empty horizon, a blank slate. And with that, a great reset, an exhale. The work blurs the line between human and environment; it is a reminder of the many cycles of life, death and rebirth ‒ and how one cannot exist without the other. Today’s scientists freely admit the secrets of the universe are still mostly unknown, yet this experience leaves you feeling nearer to its truth. Expect to re-emerge seeing everything, even yourself, differently.

– Breathe | Mauri Ora runs at Te Papa from December 13 to April 27. Exhibition entry + VR experience is $40. Book tickets online.