An internet image of a bomb explosion near Kabul, Afghanistan is rendered in a landscape with growing flowers. Over a period of 2-6 weeks, flowers planted in a grid — a pattern that mimics a printer’s dot, or the striated bands of color from a digital image with a reduced color palette — will grow into a slowly appearing image of a large bomb detonation, like a photographic image emerging in the developer bath in the darkroom.

Viewers who experience the piece at ground level can admire the seemingly irregular arrangement of densely planted flowers. Viewers who can access a vantage point high enough can read the explosion image made up of the flowers. The grid of regionally and seasonally appropriate perennials is 40 x 40 ft. Different species and colors of flowers correspond to each color of the image.

WWII bomber pilots couldn’t tell how accurately they had hit their target, so their planes were equipped with cameras that shot aerial views. In contemporary warfare, technology provides human bombers with a remote experience of the bombing, as information about the landscape and target is rendered symbolically on a control panel or performed by a drone. This photograph was made during an air strike in Kabul that allegedly killed civilians at a social event.

The Bomb Bloom proposal was exhibited as an installation in 2004 at Brown University’s Bell Gallery.