Google teams up with Tate Modern, lets you collaborate on animations

Aspiring artists of the world rejoice. Google and renowned British art museum the Tate Modern have teamed for an HTML 5 and Javascript-based online art experiment that lets you collaborate with others to create animations and stories using a web-based drawing tool.

Called This Exquisite Forest, the experiment features short “seed” animations from the likes of Bill Woodrow, Dryden Goodwin, Julian Opie, Mark Titchner, Miroslaw Balka, Olafur Eliasson and Raqib Shaw.

From these seeds you can add new animations that extend the story or “branch it in a new direction”. According to Google, as more sequences are added, the animations grow into trees, “creating a potentially infinite number of possible endings to each animation”.

Google claims that the HTML 5 and Javascript produces “a unique content creation and exploration experience”:

For example, the Web Audio API makes it possible for contributors to generate music to accompany their submissions. The project also runs on Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage.

The experiment will appear on the website, but there will also be interactive installation at the Tate Modern. Trees seeded by Tate artists—and the contributions from the public—will be on display as large-scale projections.

People visiting the Gallery can contribute using digital drawing stations, but if you’re not going to be in London any time soon, you can build your own animation on the website.