Last summer, artist Molly Dilworth began creating physical art for the digital landscape. How? By painting large-scale, rooftop murals that could be viewed and photographed via satellite, eventually appearing on Google Earth’s virtual globe. As she explains on her project page, the idea was motivated by her desire to characterize an unconsidered element of the urban environment:

“The view of our built environment from the satellite is surprisingly unconsidered. Our buildings are clearly not designed for the bird’s-eye view, we put the HVAC, water towers and vents – the things we don’t want to look at- up there, and why not? Until recently it was mostly out of sight, out of mind. The landscape from above in our cities is remarkably bland and anonymous; it’s hard to imagine the façade of a building with so little ornamentation or identifying features.”

Her first piece (pictured above) appears on a rooftop in the neighborhood of Chelsea in New York City. It took her a full month to complete, during which she would work each day for “as long as the sun was out.” We were floored by Molly’s images of the work-in-progress (below), and even more impressed by her pitch video, in which she offers a charmingly modest take on her wildly ambitious endeavor. Watch the video — and support her endeavor — at her project page, here. For more images of the mural, check out her Flickr page, here.