Watch This: Artists Ackroyd & Harvey Use Projected Light To “Print” Photos On Grass

There has been a bit of a rebirth in photo printing lately, due in part to the fleeting nature of online sharing platforms like Facebook and Instagram. If you really want a slow printing process, however, you can try grass as a printing medium. Artists Ackroyd and Harvey have been doing just that, using a projection setup and film negatives to “print” onto big swatches of grass.

The negatives filter the light, allowing only certain colors and amounts of light to reach the organic substrate (I had to think of a lot of words for “grass” in this post), which causes natural variations in the amount of growth and photosynthesis. The result is really a “print” of the photo using different shades of green and yellow.

Of course, this is in now way practical and some of you will surely find it kind of silly, but I have a soft spot for interesting projects like this. After all, they’re recording light in a creative way, which is our ultimate goal here.