Grassflows  (2009, no longer live) was a web application that used the Google Earth application by Google to revisit Hans Haacke’s installation Grass Grows (1969) which was part of curator Willoughby Sharp’s 1969 Earth Art exhibition held at Cornell University. In response to this legendary work, Grass Flows re-imagined it as seen through Google Earth where the grass mound was created by visualizing participating user locations around the world as a single sprout of grass. By converting the user’s IP address to a corresponding GPS location on the Earth, the project suggested a relationship between the organic phenomenal investigations of form Haacke sought in growing seed to plant with the kinds of phenomenal form possible through crowd-sourced digital interfaces that are emergent in form and shape.

The project existed online and the growth of grass sprouts was triggered by a series of QR codes embedded in an essay, “Meta-Trans-Para: Art & Culture at Network Speed“) on network art written for the AAP College newsletter at Cornell University which is distributed to alumni in time zones across the globe.

 

 

• art projects
• computational