Setting the scene at the entrance to the exhibition is an audio-visual depicting breath flowing through the lungs like water, rendered from multiple scans of a member of the collective, recorded in Germany over a period of three days.

“Your body doesn’t end with your skin,” says MLF artist and director Ersin Han Ersin, whose ambitious projects are inspired by our interconnectedness with the world around us.

“You can extend your sense of self to include forests and an entire living web of things.”

Te Papa is only the second venue to host the exhibition, an expanded version of the Works of Nature show commissioned by ACMI, Australia’s national museum of screen culture, in Melbourne.

Some of the digital artworks are more than 5m high, and involve collaborations with musicians, artists, engineers, scientists and gaming specialists.

As you enter the gallery, a huge video installation called Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest shows the Amazonian kapok pulsating with life in a glorious kaleidoscope of colour as nutrients and water flow between its crown and the soil.

To create the work, members of the collective spent weeks mapping the tree with LiDAR scans, which use light and lasers to measure distance and volume. These were then digitally rendered, stripping away the bark to reveal its inner workings.

Multi-channel field recordings were also taken on site, not only creating a fully immersive experience but a pulsating heartbeat that subconsciously draws your breathing to match its rhythm.

The same process was used in Sequoia National Park to capture the giant redwood depicted in the final installation, We Live in an Ocean of Air.

Te Papa curator Thom Linley, who accompanied the Herald through the exhibition, says the result is not only a technically accurate scan but a portrait of an individual tree.

“I love that when you see the actual photographs, you recognise them,” he says. “It isn’t a model of a tree; it isn’t a representation of a tree. It’s her. There she is.”

As a scientist, Linley finds the level of detail extraordinary, using sophisticated technology as a tool to reconnect us with nature.

“We think of trees as these static things, but they’re a hive of activity,” he says, stepping into the projection.

“We can see the blues of the water molecules in the phloem riding up the trunk and the deeper-red carbon-based sugars and proteins coming down in the xylem.

“Then once you get up to the crown, you see it exhaling the oxygen and taking in the CO2. You’ve even got the fungal rhizomes [threads that create a web in the soil] pulsing like synapses in a sort of brain network. There’s so much information hidden here.”

Evolver, a 14-minute sequence projected on to dual screens, follows a breath through the human body using a collage of scientific datasets, including MRI and CT scans.

Colonies of cells swirl like a galaxy of stars in the cosmos, contained within the shadow of a human skeleton.

Distortions in Spacetime plunges you into the heart of a collapsing star on the brink of forming a black hole. An interactive simulation, it responds to movement so you become part of the artwork.

Gradually, the gravitational field becomes so strong it stretches your body in a process known as “spaghettification”, which really is what would happen if you fell into a black hole.

“From the outside, you would just fade away as less and less of your light makes it out,” says Linley. “But death isn’t always the end. It can be a source of life.

“The more complicated, heavier molecules in our bodies could only have been forged in dying stars. Everything would be helium and hydrogen without that.

“So the saying ‘we are all made of stardust’ is a very grounded, factual quote.”

A final display details the science behind the exhibition and how it was created. Linley recommends taking the show slowly, allowing time for the artworks to slowly reveal themselves.

“You need to sort of fall into the pieces and sit with them for a while,” he says. “They’re beautiful works of art, but there’s also a huge amount of information within them.

“This is a Northern Hemisphere-based collective, but it really speaks to mātauranga, too

“Most cultures have had concepts of our interconnectedness with nature, and it’s interesting how they converge as a kind of consistent truth.

“The scientific understanding is that we had a single-point origin of life. That means we’re all a family. We are all connected.”

Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.