What happens when millions of strangers are asked to start an art project together? The Reddit experiment r/place turns out to be a fascinating experience.
This year again, there were numerous funny April Fool’s jokes to marvel at on the Internet. But none caused as big a stir as Reddit’s event.
After a five-year hiatus, the social media platform brought back r/Place, one of the most popular online experiments of all time. Over 16 million users took part this year, who will surely remember the memorable event for a long time – and not only for its great pixel artworks.
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What is r/Place anyway?
Do you remember the (One Million Dollar Homepage)? In the mid-2000s, you could buy individual pixels on an empty website and then colour them in. The Reddit event works on exactly the same principle. However, it is of course completely free and much, much bigger.
Since each Reddit user can only place a single, tiny tile every five minutes, it is impossible to build alone. Instead, users are forced to collaborate and form coordinated communities to create collective works of pixel art.
However, since the space on the canvas is severely limited and each community wants to realise its own ideas, this naturally creates an incredibly high potential for conflict.
You can see a complete time-lapse of the event in the following video:
Fight for every pixel
You might think that this April Fool’s joke was just a nice little experiment, slapping pixels on a big map without making sense. But a great many users took r/Place very seriously, as if a long-forgotten tribal consciousness had been reactivated in them. Once they have committed themselves to a project of their choice, they defend its place on the canvas with all their might.
Large Reddit communities with many active users are naturally at an advantage here and have a much easier time establishing their artworks in the long term.
Some notable examples:
- The late streamer Reckful was immortalised in the form of his space duck, which was often seen with him in the stream.
- The Star Wars community recreated the movie poster for Episode 4: A New Hope and a scene of the duel between Anakin and Obi Wan from Episode 3.
- Many communities also wanted to send a message: The anti-car subreddit r/FuckCars, for example, is building a giant car park to show what a huge waste of space they are in our cities.
- The Dutch have recreated the famous painting De Nachtwache by painter Rembrandt van Rijn.
- The German subreddit r/de was also represented with two huge German flags, which were decorated with cute pixel images – including Bernd das Brot, Käpt’n Blaubär and Hein Blöd, Beethoven, the Cologne Cathedral, the Merkel rhombus or the painting Wanderer over the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.
The German flag is also a good example of how the different communities can work together successfully. For example, the German federal eagle is given a good swig of the Belgian strong beer Duvel. This not only looks funny, but also demonstrates the distinctive beer culture of the two countries.
Such creative ideas are welcomed by the r/Place community. However, it’s a completely different story when Twitch streamers bring themselves into the game with their huge communities.
The streamer invasion
Most of you have probably at least read the name xQc before: The Canadian screamer is not only the biggest streamer on Twitch, but also regularly causes controversy. This was also the case during the r/Place event.
With over 200,000 concurrent viewers, many of whom obey their idol to the letter, this one has the ability to quickly claim large areas of the map for himself. However, when he wanted to paint over the space of the ever-popular Star Wars poster with his logo (an icon of Winston the monkey from Overwatch), he effectively made himself an enemy of the state:
Not only were all his attempts to establish his own artwork on r/place from then on directly thwarted – according to his own statements, he even received numerous death threats for his reckless behaviour.
In contrast, Mizkif showed how streamers can participate in the event in a much more productive way. He repeatedly invited representatives of the various communities to diplomatic talks in his stream and tried to mediate.
During the turf war between France and Spain, however, without much success, but with witty comments:
After all, he was able to unite all the great streamers and their viewers in the final hours of the event to make the memorial for the late streamer Reckful a reality.
That’s something to see!
Despite all the drama, the final result shows the beauty and multifaceted nature of internet culture: you will search in vain for hate and symbols of radicalised groups, instead hundreds of small and large works of art were created.
If you really want to see every detail, you can spend hours exploring the finished canvas:
Millions of strangers were successfully brought together and worked together on something they enjoyed. And even if it was only for a weekend – those who took part in this part of Internet history will certainly not forget it so quickly.
What do you think of this online experiment? Is there any artwork that you particularly like? Write it in the comments
