Photos on grass
UK artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey "printed" photographs on grass. This particular piece was an advertisement installation at the 2008 Wimbledon Tennis Championships. From Creative Review:
The artists essentially use grass as a form of photographic paper, projecting a black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows in a dark room, and using the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs. As Wimbledon is the only remaining Grand Slam tennis tournament that takes place on grass, it was a natural fit for Ackroyd & Harvey’s work, which has also appeared on the National Theatre Lyttleton flytower and Dilston Grove in Bermondsey. For this work, they photographed three people at Wimbledon prior to the tournament, and displayed the resulting grass versions of the photos on three large panels in Merton Park, where the tennis fans have been camping and then queuing for tickets this year.Photos on grass (Creative Review)
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It would be more impressive on a field, or even the court itself, but it is pretty neat. Now we need a CNC mower, so we can do this in 3-d. I wonder how long the coloration would last in living grass on a field? Could a scanning array of low power UV lasers do this on a lawn? Imagine the possibilities of at-a-distance photorealistic grass printing...
Can't you achieve the same effect with pee? Perhaps HP could come up with an HPee printer for this.
This reminds me of Vietnamese-American Binh Dahn's pioneering "chlorophyll prints." http://www.examiner.com/a-319385%7ETurning_over_a_new_leaf.html
I wonder if they were influenced by him.
JenJen(#2) Not exactly. There is a difference between dead grass and light-starved grass. Please don't ask me how I know this.
This is yet another example of an obvious, dead simple idea that turns out to be a (minor) stroke of genius.
I tried to "burn" a photographic negative onto a CD-R using sunlight once. After over a week of exposure it didn't even make a dent.
The greening of photography!
A friend of mine showed me some photos of a similar installation by the same artists at the Big Chill festival last year.
What's particularly nice about these is that the photos will gradually fade as the grass continues growing.
I have mixed feelings about artwork that is intentionally temporary. If it's worth creating in the first place why not make it "permanent"? On the other hand many forms of artistic expression have always been immediate or temporary. Dance, and theater come to mind.
Of course they can be recorded, but so can these grass photographs.
Big Chill festival installation:
http://www.bigchill.net/images/story/ackroydandharvey.jpg
A large ink jet printer that uses fertilizer solution as ink should also work. Hmmm, Lawn graffiti!