It is huge and confusing: The digital painting “Place”, on german “Place”, is back, and again probably thousands of users are participating again to “paint along”. The art got so many upvotes that it doesn’t need help from Upvote Shop.
Reddit Place: Users paint digital hidden object
But what is it about? “Place” is a digital hands-on image consisting of two million pixels. Anyone who wants to participate can color one of the pixels with one of 16 colors once a minute. When thousands of users paint simultaneously, an almost vivid, chaotic hidden object is created.
It becomes particularly exciting when the “painters” coordinate and at the same time color pixels in order to create images. Particularly popular are national flags, characters, and banners from video games and other pop culture. The platform has already come under criticism because users can bluntly paint their pictures if they only gather enough people. For example, there are always attempts to build Nazi symbols into a work of art. But the community reacts and paints over the signs quickly.
Hardly anything on “Place” lasts: after only one minute, the entire work of art in the artwork could have disappeared again, and the picture lives and develops every second.
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“Place” returns after five years
The current “Place” is already the second edition: Five years ago, on April 1, there was already a digital hidden object. The action, which is described by the developers as an art-social experiment, became known via the Reddit platform. Now, five years later, the second edition is running. According to developers, more than one million users “painted” on the first work of art, and pixels were recolored around 16 million times within four days.
If you want to see how the artwork changes every second, you have to look closely and zoom into a 2000 by 1000 pixel area: The live updates are again available on Reddit in the “Place” subforum. The second edition of “Place” is expected to run until April 4, also like the first project four days.
The project was developed, among others, by the developer Josh Wardle, who also contributed to Reddit himself and recently achieved hype with the Internet game “Wordle”. The first version of “Place” attracted a lot of attention, the newspaper “Newsweek” described it as the “best experiment of the Internet so far”.