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Leander Herzog: 26 Views of 1 Field, and You Can Touch the Grass

Leander Herzog's Field, on view at Nguyen Wahed in New York to November 21, is a living field of grass computed in real time and split into 26 onchain views. Touch it in one, and every other view sees you.

October 30, 2026•CATALOGUE•

"A screen with a static image is like a stuffed animal," Leander Herzog wrote on October 19. 9 days later his answer opened in New York. Field, 2026, a generative real time animation built with JavaScript and WebGPU, is on view at Nguyen Wahed, 504 E 12th St, from October 28 to November 21.

The work is a field of grass that never stops growing. It is computed live and never repeats a single frame, each blade "planted once as data and recalculated frame by frame," as the exhibition text on Artwrld puts it. Blades bend and shift without a loop, glowing silver against black, and the image answers touch, click and pointer, so a visitor's gesture becomes part of the picture.

Field is split into 26 tokens, released fully onchain on Herzog's own contract on Ethereum. "Each token is a different, curated view of the same field," he explains. The small numbers floating in the grass mark where the other cameras are. The alphabet has 26 letters, so every key on a keyboard jumps to a view, and the work switches views once a minute "so everybody gets to experience the same shared space."

The networked part is the quiet surprise. "You can touch the grass and it will be visible in every view that sees this area of the field," Herzog writes. "In realtime, no wallet or transaction required." Mimi Nguyen of Nguyen Wahed put it more simply on opening night: "Touch grass (literally) and everyone else in the field will see your presence." For an artist who has spent years making code that moves, from Infinite Garden to his Tezos works, Field turns a single living landscape into a place many people stand in at once.

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