New climate and art experiments with Google Arts & Culture

The world through the eyes of a Pollinator, with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: “What would the world look like if you were a pollinator, or a plant? This is what I am asking visitors with Pollinator Pathmaker, a 55-meter-long living artwork planted in September 2021 at the Eden Project in Cornwall. The garden is designed, planted and optimized for pollinators’ tastes, using a specially designed algorithm and a curated palette of plants.

The artwork — originally commissioned by the Eden Project with support from the Garfield Weston Foundation as part of Eden’s Create a Buzz program — is the first of a series of gardens that will be planted across the UK, Europe and hopefully the world. With Pollinator Pathmaker, we invite visitors to take part in an international art-led campaign to help save bees and other endangered species of pollinating insects—the first of its kind. There has been a terrifying decline in pollinating insects in the last 40 years due to habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, and climate change; the artwork is a call to take action against this.

Starting today, people around the world can be part of this unique artwork by visiting pollinator.art, an experiment developed in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture and with founding partners Gaia Art Foundation. The online Pollinator Pathmaker experience allows people to create, plant, and share their own garden, designed for bees and other insect pollinators, in whatever space they have available – at home, in allotments, community gardens, and more.

Enter your location and garden conditions, and the algorithm will create a planting design to support the maximum pollinator species possible. It chooses plants from a palette of plants – each chosen for their benefits to particular pollinators – and arranges them to suit different foraging styles. Users can fly around and through a 3D visualization of their unique garden as it blooms and transforms over the seasons, created from plant paintings I made of each plant used.

By planting living artworks for pollinators around the world, I hope together we can create the world’s largest ever climate positive artwork.”

These two new experiences and many more are available for everyone to interact with online, and if you’d like to continue your journey of exploration of climate, art and technology, don’t miss Culture Meets Climate, Google Arts & Culture’s home for all artist, museum and scientist collaborations focused on telling the planet’s stories and reimagining climate data.