A recent virtual event called “r/place” took place on Reddit. The event lasted for 4 days (1st-4th April 2022) and the rules were simple: there was an empty white canvas, 32 colors of tiles were available to Redditors and each person was allowed to put one tile in every 5 minutes. At the end of the third day, the final look of the canvas was immortalized and is still being presented on the Reddit page. On the fourth day, only white-colored tiles were available for the participants, and in a few hours, the canvas gained its former blank look. Nearly 72 million pixels were placed by over 6 million users at a pace of more than 2.5 million pixels placed per hour.
The project can be seen as a smart marketing strategy for Reddit as well as a social experiment that left us with a unique canvas. Several questions can be asked: in which ways the cutouts of the canvas circulated on varied other platforms, how they were perceived by the public, what might this event tell us about virtual solidarity, and how the final image is materialized and used on products such as mouse pads or posters. What I want to focus here is more the elements survived on the canvas, as well as how they survived; and touch upon the topics such as the emotional attachment to certain symbols, virtual solidarity, and the use of different mediums.
Click to the image to see the canvas in high resolution.
To skim through the canvas, there are games (Among Us), cartoon and anime characters (Cars, Totoro), country flags, famous memes and stickers, singers and music groups (Barış Manço, Eminem), painters and art pieces (The Tortoise Trainer, The Night Watch by Rembrandt), historical/political figures (Kemal Atatürk, Emmanuel Macron), scientists, sports teams and emblems (Chelsea, NBA), entertainment websites, historical monuments (Colosseum, Notre-Dame), universities and also some original designs. At first glance, we can deduce that some recently emerged and popularized games and trends are woven on the canvas as well as classics such as Super Mario and Star Wars. None of the drawings are abstract or open to the interpretation of the audience; indeed they are mostly artistic forms of well-known symbols and elements coming mostly from the entertainment sector. Thus, the connotation of the symbols to the audience is directly related to personal interests.
We know that the canvas has limited space, and whatever ended up on the final look of the canvas survived through a raging competition. The canvas is a composite of many drawings on different scales. Almost every drawing has a frame that divides them from one another, which reminds me of colonial maps. Every compartment is drawn by a certain community as it is beyond the capacity of one person to complete a drawing alone (due to 5 minutes waiting time between placing every tile). Thus, the size of the drawings is related to the size of the community which built it, the level of appreciation for that component (so that other people would not attempt to erase it), and how much time and effort one community invested in not only to draw it but also to guard it.
The concepts which did not make it on the canvas or couldn’t maintain themselves are also as important as what ended up on it. Humor, as well as national and cultural elements, were part of it. Slogans on peace and solidarity were woven on the canvas in different languages. Strikingly; explicit, pornographic, or violent contents were not displayed as the page is regulated by moderators.
On the page, solidarity is highlighted as the key to building “bigger and better images” but the mediums that the participants could use to organize were not indicated. The organization of large groups was made through platforms such as Youtube, Twitch, and Discord channels. Here, the organizational capacity of various social media platforms is why some mediums were preferred over others. How this “r/place” event echoed on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as parts of a wider media ecology can also be examined under the polymedia studies.
One of the very common concepts we observe on the canvas is country flags that are garnished with the monuments, foods, or events that are stereotypically related to those countries such as Holland and windmills or France and croissants. On the left bottom corner of the canvas, the France flag takes up quite a wide space, which required great manpower and effort to build as well as maintain. On social media and even on the news channels, the scale of drawing was associated with the greatness of the virtual French communities and the sentiment of national pride. The image of the French flag and historical monuments were also used on Twitter to mock the recent French presidential elections. All aside, so-called “defending” a territory also implies the existence of the others who are destroying the piece. This situation forces the individual participants of the event to participate either in the creation or destruction of a particular piece; which I find odd for such a collaborative art project.
We live in an increasingly hyper-visual world in which visual communications and engagement with the world are deeply rooted in our psychology and social practices. An event as such that enables millions to participate in the creation of a canvas comes along with the questions of the power and means of solidarity, common grounds and interests, and the question of territory. All these concepts are embedded in the final look of the canvas, woven in different forms and scales; and even hidden behind some symbols.
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