Hello, world!” is a real installation for the virtual globe of
the software Google Earth. A Semacode measuring 160 x 160 meters was mown into a wheat field near the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18 x 18 bright and dark squares producing decoded the phrase “Hello, world!”.The project was realized in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture flight in the following month.

Hello, world!
The phrase “Hello, world!” was born of Brian Kernighan’s idea. After Kernighan had published his programming manual “The C Programming Language” in 1978, it became tradition
- learning a programming language - to write a programme as a first step, that produces the “Hello, world!” sequence of characters on the screen. This has been a simple exercise to gain first insights into the syntactical demands of a programming language. “Hello, world!” thus symbolizes the first moment of acquiring a technology.