An aerial view of a green field featuring a large, pixelated square pattern cropped into the crops. In the distance, a small village with red-roofed houses sits nestled among farmland and woodland.

Bernhard Hopfengärtner: Hello World (a visual code for Google Earth)

Words: TheGreenEyl
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Date: 28 July 2010; Work
Art

Hello, world! is a real installation for the virtual globe of the software Google
Earth. A Semacode measuring 160 × 160 metres was mown into a wheat field near
the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18 × 18 bright and
dark squares producing decoded the phrase “Hello, world!”. The ambition was to
have an areal view of the code integrated in Google Earths’ regular database. The
project was realised in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture
flight in the following month.