22-year-old, Vancouver-based artist Melanie Coles has constructed a 2,300-square-foot Waldo, which is now secured on a rooftop in her hometown, waiting to be detected by Google Earth’s satellites. Coles made the Waldo–with a little help from some friends–as a graduation project for the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The school has a knack for nurturing inventive thinking; we reported on another graduate’s clever Urban Binning Unit in our July-August 2006 issue.
Speaking recently to NPR, Coles drew a parallel between moving her generation’s hunt for Waldo from the printed page to the Internet and “what’s happening with magazines and TV and radio all going online.” She also tied the Waldo to ancient traditions of constructing earthly monuments only visible from the sky.
Images by Carolyn Coles, licensed under Creative Commons.
