GPF Global's flagship conference brought ministers, former heads of state and CEOs into Club Volksgarten for an afternoon and evening of talks. The venue has a LED installation running almost continuously around the main room, which meant the canvas for this project was a single strip 16,374 pixels wide.

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GPF's visual world is nature and we chose a jungle theme: Mist, canopy, deep green. So rather than the usual corporate backdrop, the idea was to welcome everyone into a rainforest made of light. The wall held the room for five hours: a slow ambient canopy through the talks, and a sequence that took over the full width whenever a new speaker came to the stage, paired with a sound signature designed by Alexander Reitterer, who was also the sound engineer during the event.

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The canopy itself is built from a mix of various elements, photography, video, and animated elements layered into something that reads as depth rather than decoration. That turned out to be the real work. A convincing jungle never shows you a whole plant. You get fragments, overlap, shadow, things growing in from above and leaving the frame again. Getting that right mattered more than any individual element.

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I spend a lot of my time photographing plants, usually a few millimetres at a time, and usually not in a jungle. Building this thing at 16,000 pixels wide feels like a similar preoccupation at the opposite end of the scale. For one evening, a few hundred people got to stand inside it. I thought that was pretty cool.