This Exquisite Forest at Tate Modern

This Exquisite Forest is an online collaborative art project that lets users create short animations that build off one another as they explore a specific theme. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling trees.

To provide inspiration, eight artists whose work already hangs in the Tate Modern, including Olafur Elliason and Julian Opie, have created digital, animated saplings for others to grow, along with instructions (Elliason's instructions: "Be energy (not about energy); Use yellow often, but not always; Show that light is life; Exercise empathetic attention; Share this with friends.") These artist trees will be curated, with submissions vetted by Koblin and co, but "the rest of it's open: people can submit whatever they want and it will instantly go up," Koblin says.

The best animations will show on large video screens in the Tate Modern over the next six months in the collection galleries on Level 3 at Tate Modern, beginning on July 23, 2012. There is a digital drawing station in the Gallery or connect from your own computer (but.....do you have Google Chrome?!)

The project was conceived by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, and produced by Google and Tate. It makes extensive use of Google Chrome’s HTML5 and JavaScript support, as well as Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage.