What began as an April Fool’s day joke on Reddit, has transformed into something really quite beautiful. I might be naive, oblivious to the darker meanings of some of the internet, but without reading too much into them, the artwork on r/place looks incredible. Chaotic and egalitarian – the only sad news is apparently the image will come down tomorrow.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but let me lay out what I understand, thus far at least:
– r/place is a subreddit compromising an image measuring 2,000 x 2,000 pixels
– It currently has 3.4 million members
– Any Reddit user can change the colour of a pixel, choosing between 16 different colours
– After altering a pixel, users have to wait at least five minutes before they can change one again
– Internet communities have coordinated to create images, each fighting for their own little area of the image
– They say it’s going to come down tomorrow
As the pixels are constantly changing, you can see different factions of the internet fighting for the r/place real estate in real time. I’ve spent the last few minutes watching Poland and Lithuania wage war. It began with Lithuania’s flag attempting to encroach on the top of Poland’s, only for the Poles to fight back and make serious inroads into Southern Lithuania. While, in the real world, the two nations are brought together by a shared enemy in Belarus’ despot Lukashenko, on r/place it’s a dog eat dog world. You come for my pixels, I’ll come for yours.
Various world flags are just one portion of it. Famous memes crop up throughout. There’s a large memorial to ‘TotalBiscuit’, a late video game critic who sadly passed away in 2018. A Star Wars lightsaber fight features towards the bottom, as does a recreation of ex-Formula 1 driver Nico Rosberg, and what appears to be Bob Dylan. Above you can see an homage to Greggs. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Munch’s The Scream, and Vermeer’s The Girl with a Pearl Earring have also all been recreated in digital form on r/place.
It’s an honest representation of the people of the internet. What they care about, what they find funny, what they find annoying and who they want to antagonise. In the same corner that a large Ukrainian peace banner stretches, you find a ‘Go Blue’ for the University of Michigan’s Wolverines (sports teams).
The whole thing is both entirely random and painstakingly orchestrated. However various internet communities mobilise, they clearly have a plan. I just tried to disrupt Twitch FR’s Arc de Triomphe, found in the bottom left corner, and was swiftly pixelated back over.
