America’s Most Elaborate Corn Maze Is Made of GPS and Math

Source: Wired | September 23, 2016 | Diane Kelly

Mike Wissemann’s 300-year-old Massachusetts farm grows asparagus, strawberries, sweet corn. And each year since 2000, it also sprouts an elaborate image in seed corn. Designed for many years by landscape artist Will Sillin, and since 2015 by Mike’s daughter-in-law Jess Marsh Wissemann, Mike’s Maze has featured portraits of Charles Darwin and Noah Webster; replicas of the Mona Lisa and Andy Warhol’s soup can; and interpretations of Alice in Wonderland and a classic Work Projects Administration poster.

Making a corn maze might seem simple: Grow a field of corn and cut out everything that isn’t part of the maze. Most farms stick with geometric shapes and simple pictures. But Wissemann’s goal is to fuse fine art with seed corn—and that can be difficult. Artists cut the designs as the corn grows, and removing the wrong stalks can skew lines, squash letters, or change the shape of an eye or a chin. To succeed, Wissemann’s Sunderland farm has used an arsenal of high- and low-tech tools, and over the years the gear available has changed the look of the maze.

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2015-2016: Drones for Detail

After Sillin’s retirement, Jess Marsh Wissemann took over maze design for the farm, creating woodcut-inspired images that take advantage of the strong lines the mower leaves in the field. But her designs also include finer details that are narrower than the paths the mower can cut.

To add them, she heads into the field with her husband and a camera-carrying drone that sends real-time video to a receiver on the ground. By shaking individual corn stalks she finds the ones that need to be removed for her design, and cuts them out of the field by hand. “One stalk can make a really big difference,” she says. She ought to know: The technique has put pupils in the eyes of the Cheshire Cat and recreated the font of the WPA posters that inspired this year’s maze design, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

Her plans for next year are still a tightly-held secret.

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