r/Place Inspiration

In our tutorial we talked about our ideas and experiments, this lead to a discussion about the collaborative art experiment on reddit. On April Fools' Day 2017, this social experiment was launched in the form of a subreddit called "place" (r/Place). It featured a collaborative pixel art canvas, where a user could place a pixel every five minutes (the timer was temporarily ten and twenty minutes for a few hours on April 1). This created a whole collaborative art piece over time. Below is a time-lapse captured by a user of the progress of the piece over time.

As you can see in the time-lapse there was almost a war going on, at the start a bunch of reddit users decided they wanted to 'blue screen' the piece, to make it look like a computer screen that has just malfunctioned. However this was eventually covered up by other groups. You can also see groups from specific countries that have worked together to show their flag. People also worked together to create memes, pop culture references, logos, LGBTQ+ flags and whole recreations of art.

I am so inspired by this piece, it was such an ambitious project but worked out so perfectly. It created a beautiful and in depth piece which i could stare at for hours taking in each pixel. It really brings together different communities in the form of digital/pixel art. This is very similar to what i want to do, have different people virtually collaborating on a piece.