rPlace wraps up 72-hour multimillion participant digital art project

Back in 2017 Reddit launched an experiment: one pixel every five minutes, one million open slots. 

Starting on April 1, 2017, r/Place was a social experiment that lasted for 72 hours where users were able to place one pixel on a one million pixel canvas. They had 16 colors to choose from. The experiment was commended for its representation of Internet culture as a whole. 

On April 1 r/Place came back online with a fresh canvas and more people than ever before with amounts estimated at about 3 million users on the subreddit. Communities like r/osuplace and r/hkplace have been popping up dedicated to making art on the canvas. 

Over time, multiple, “voids” have been formed dedicated to taking up as much of the canvas as possible with a single color.Petitions have been started to make r/Place a yearly event every April 1 with 72.3k upvotes at the time of writing. 

It’s great to see people come together and create something meaningful. The canvas had been sprinkled with Ukrainian flags showing support for Ukraine in recent events and communities like r/Starwars have created entire movie posters on the canvas. One of my favorite streamers Moistcritikal claimed a plot next to the Colts fans, and I personally helped in protecting that plot and helped with other projects across the board. It’s a massive sense of community and accomplishment when you see something like this finished. I don’t think people understand how much collaboration this takes, and just how many people are involved. r/Place has over 5 million members with lots of users not even joining and just adding to the canvas.

The project has recently concluded, and you can see the evolution of the efforts with this link.

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