The Exquisite Forest is an interesting site that crowd sources freeform art and animation. Anyone can participate. Work can be curated. In their words:

“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.

A physical installation is located in the collection galleries on Level 3 at Tate Modern, and will be open for approximately 6 months beginning on July 23, 2012.”

Watch the short video where they explain the concept better than I ever could:

The tree that I decided to participate in on the site was one of the incredible artist Olafer Eliasson. I went to an exhibition of his in Berlin last year. It is also being curated for the Tate Modern exhibition. I made my animation on the site off of a curated branch of his tree and submitted it. I based my animation off the colors that I remember from one of his walk-through smoke pieces. A week later I received an email that it made the cut!

View my animation branch in which I participated in with Olafer Eliasson

The animations are 8 frames long and the web tools you can use to create them are absolutely stunning and give you tons of control. Should have known as the people behind the project are Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin who brought us the Wilderness Downtown and The Johnny Cash Project.

“.. 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.”

I’m super thrilled to bo able to be a part of this awesome collaboration… and very much thrilled that my contribution might end up in the exhibition at the Tate. I encourage any of you make your own branch or start your own tree!

Read more about the Exquisite Forest on PandoDaily