Google has partnered with Tate Modern London Gallery to create a new art experiment called This Exquisite Forest.

Photo: This Exquisite Forest Installation, from googleblog.blogspot.com

The project is open to all Chrome users who have an opportunity to collaborate with each other to create animations and stories online. Using a web-based drawing tool, visitors to the site can «add their own animations and extend the story or branch it in a new direction», says Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab, Data Arts Team.

Seven established artists from Tate’s collection have created ‘seed’ trees, which can be extended through adding new branches. The more sequences are added, the bigger the trees grow.

The featured artists are including Bill Woodrow, Dryden Goodwin, Julian Opie, Mark Titchner, Miroslaw Balka, Olafur Eliasson and Raqib Shaw. Each of them set his own inspirational rules of how better to do it. For example: “Be energy (not about energy). Use yellow often but not always. Show that light is life. Exercise the empathic attention.” says Olafur Eliasson, the artist who also collaborated with BMW, the company that also runs a common project with Tate entitled ‘Performace Room’ .

As part of the project, Google will open an interactive installation on July 23 in the Level 3 gallery of Tate Modern. People will see the trees drawn by Tate artists as large-scale projections. They will also be able to contribute to the project right at the gallery, using digital drawing stations.

The Exquisite Forest, which also runs on Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage, is based on Chrome’s HTML5 and JavaScript features including the Web Audio API which allows users add music to their submissions.