Technology Meets Mother Nature – A Man Makes a Forest-Shaped Guitar, While A Family Makes a QR Code Cornfield Maze
How is this for a sweet, music-tinged story. Argentinian Pedro Ureta’s wife, Graciela, passed away at the age of 25. She had often talked about making a forest of plants and trees shaped like a giant guitar (via Technabob). This is similar to my giant “drinkable beer waterfall” dream project. However, Pedro has now created such a forest, in honour of his wife’s memory. It’s been a few years in the making, but it has now taken shape, as you can see by the picture below. What does one call this thing anyway – a guiforest?
To get the variety of colours, Pedro uses blue eucalyptus trees for the neck of the guitar. The outline of the forest is comprised of cypress trees. Approximately 7000 trees were used for the amazing project. Now, if Pedro put speakers through the forest, we would have an even more incredible project.
Perhaps even more amazing is that we have another nature-related technology on the same day. The Kraay family from Alberta has set the Guinness world record for the largest QR code ever created. How did they do it? They used a 15 acre piece of land to make a giant QR-shaped cornfield maze that occupies 7 acres of land (via Digital Trends).
Like most cool and ridiculous ideas, the design came from a simple conversation. Rachel Kraay said “We were just sitting around reading magazines and stuff when we saw one of the QR codes on the cover. I thought, ‘You know it kinds of looks like a maze, I wonder if we could make one?’ and the idea just kind of snowballed from there.”
QR (Quick Response) codes are those things I sometimes blog about, but don’t know anyone that actually uses them. You can scan them with your phone, and have them take you to a website about the item you’re scanning. More outlandish uses include Graveyard Biographies, or information from an entire Welsh town.
If you’re wondering if the giant QR code is functional, the answer is yes. The Kraays had to darken parts of the field to get it to work, but a helicopter flew over the field and managed to scan with it with a smartphone. Seems practical. “Hey Bob, fuck this flight to Vancouver – look what my QR code scanner just brought up!”
The cornfield maze has a QR code in the centre, which takes you to the Kraay family’s farm website. And hey, if you die trying to make it to the centre, you can always put a QR code on your tombstone noting how you died.
