Draw a forest with Tate and Google

This Exquisite Forest is the brain child of Chris Milk – he who created the crowd-sourced Johnny Cash Project – and creative director of Google Aaron Koblin, and has been delivered on a grand scale with the backing of Tate and the clout of Google’s global audience.

It’s based on exquisite corpse, the game in which one person starts a drawing or a sentence for others to follow on from, hastening the unfolding of an unexpected narrative.

Design Week encountered the same game a few weeks back, when KK Outlet looked to stage an Art Relay.

Online at www.exquisiteforest.com visitors can create animations leading on from each others’ contributions and the original ‘seed animations’ created by artists from the Tate’s collection.

Balka, Opie, Olafur Eliasson, Dryden Goodwin, Raqib Shaw, Mark Tichner, and Bill Woodrow used a web based drawing tool to create a series of animation sequences. 

These will provide a reference point for what the Tate calls ‘dynamically growing videos,’ which will divide in different directions and make an infinite number of possible endings it says.

Visitors to the website, and the gallery – where there is a physical installation version of the project – are encouraged to carry on the pictorial tales. 

A physical installation at the Tate incorporates large scale projections and digital drawing stations which visitors access through tablets.

In time The Tate hopes new seeds will be added in the hope of making a ‘forest of animations,’ it says.

Head of content and creative director at Tate, Jane Burton says, ‘Now more than ever new web technologies allow the museum to be a place where ideas, experiences and opinions, about art and culture are explained.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnhJ1841K-8

This Exquisite Forest is live online and can be viewed at Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1, until the end of the year.