The RAF Exhibit Gallery hosts an immersive with mutliple screens showing FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse on April 14, 2026 at Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara for NPR hide caption toggle caption Caitlin O’Hara for NPR PHOENIX — It was about 6:30 a.m. when the saguaro fell and the group chat lit up. Lidar scanners — the same tech that allows self-driving cars to create 3D maps of their environments — had been capturing the day-by-day evolution of the giant cactus for six months. They recorded the colossus as it pulsed with life, eventually tilted and ultimately toppled in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona in February 2024. That WhatsApp chat was filled with researchers, technicians and artists who had been scanning the plant as part of a yearslong art and data project, said Laura Spalding Best, the senior director of exhibits at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, which commissioned the project. “It was so emotional and meaningful for everybody. [There] was like an excitement. But it was also super sorrowful at the …