The Ultimate Guide to r/Place AKA Pixel Wars
The biggest event on April Fool’s Day of 2017 and 2022 was a pleasant surprise as opposed to a prank. It was r/Place, the collaborative social experiment that was heard around the world.
This project is simply a blank canvas on Reddit that users can fill in one pixel at a time on a surface of 4 million pixel squares. All you have to do is click the pixel you want to replace and pick its color out of 32 available choices.
The experiment lasted around 3 days with over 1 million Redditors placing around over 16 million pixels in 2017 and over 10 million Redditors placing over 160 million pixels in 2022. The 2022 edition caused Reddit’s daily active users to reach an all-time peak.
r/Place in 2017 was invented by Welsh Brooklyn resident, Josh Wardle. Five years later, he did it again in 2022 with a bigger palette and reach. He used to work as product manager for Reddit. He also created the Reddit meta-game The Button, and the word game Wordle, which The New York Times bought for 6 figures.
As you can see in the time-lapse of the canvas being filled out and transformed one pixel at a time, there is always order in the chaos. The pluriverse (plural universes in one) is as diverse as it can be thanks to the richness and engagement of the countless subreddits that have been active for years.
Place is not just a visual representation of Internet culture but of humanity’s values and endeavors. A perfect representation of a 2D digital pluriverse, by Blaser, de la Cadena and Zapatista’s definition: “A world in which many worlds fit”, “composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same.”
Place is both media and medium. Reddit is the platform, but r/Place is a self-sustaining medium that could have been woven on its own website. Although, it probably would have lacked the universal success granted by the popularity, instancy and communal outreach of online forums. And there is an apparent relationship between the makeup of the final canvas and the individual communities within Reddit, which exist independently but cooperate as part of a larger community.
And this is a VR and heat map visualization of Reddit democracy at play between Reddit’s communities and Internet culture in general:
There’s also a VR visualization that shows a 3D version of the map with stacked pixels:
As you see, it can be visualized in many ways depending on what you are looking for. As a piece of art in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction, it’s impossible to reproduce or represent with 100% accuracy. Technology is a feature of this unique art form.
The final result is fascinating, but so is any screenshot at any point during the three-day period. Without context, all canvas versions look interesting if not fascinating. But the visual culture goes deeper than that. Every image is tied to a network of communication, collaboration, lore and communities that strive to establish their presence on an otherwise simple and inconspicuous pixel painting.
It’s the work in progress aspect that makes it shine as a historical work of art. That is why the now famous Pixel Wars are best appreciated in the full context, like in a time-lapse. Also, notice how Wars is in plural, because the pluriverse is self-evident. As Ranciere pointed out, there are new meanings and new aesthetics whenever there are new dimensions added to an art piece.
Many doubted the power of positive collaboration of communities online. And many were surprised to find out the results. New communities started on community-oriented platforms like Discord and Twitch for the purpose of coordinating their pixel art. To borrow from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the Spectacle finds a way, especially when it comes to self-expression and self-promotion. And the Internet is the perfect Agora for identity politics to play out. Representation is the strongest fuel for creativity. So, individuality is let go for the sake of your group identity, like fandoms and nations.
Users were just pixels. It didn’t matter at all who you were as an individual, only what you were contributing to the bigger picture. As the Nyan Cat inventor called it, it’s a turf war over sociocultural statements. At any given time it looks like an elaborate tapestry reflecting microcosms of internet popularity.
You see the Ukrainian flag coming in hot…
The Germans collaborating with the Belgians as their flags are basically the same…
The BTS logo attacking the French corner while the French are asleep…
Rainbow Roads collaborating with the LGBTQIA+ flag to become an interstitial aesthetic of the painting like in 2017…
The NFT scams’ logos being instantly deformed…
The Among Us crewmate subtly invading images like some type of sussy infection…
The perfect circle OSU logo surviving all attacks until the end, for some reason…
The Dutch recreating beautiful intricate paintings…
In the meantime, the Canadians struggling for two entire days to get their leaf right...
A group calling themselves the blue corner trying to do just that in the bottom right corner…
Some trolling included the 4chan and 8chan void arbitrarily swallowing giant sections of the canvas destroying all art in its path, then new art re-emerging in its wake…
There was also a British Twitch streamer community putting 3D glasses on faces…
The 3D glasses started a war between communities thinking it was the French because of the red-white-and-blue colors. They were right to accuse them because the French were sneakily adding baguettes in other artworks at that point…
Then a couple of hours before the end of Place, users became restricted to placing only white tiles, making the canvas gradually filled with white space, returning it to its original blank state, like a Big Crunch mirroring the Big Bang of this digital universe. It’s known by now as the Anti-Void:
But like in real life, such mass-scale worldwide projects attract obstructionism and dissent. Popular streamers on Twitch intervened in the event by instructing their followers in real time to modify existing images. Their popularity and efficiency offended many smaller fandoms that have been working hard to keep those small spaces.
Even xQc, the #1 Twitch streamer at the time, reached a new record of 233,000 concurrent viewers thanks to r/Place. But he led his community in adding The Void wherever they can, so his fans kept getting banned by Reddit admins, and he claims he received more death threats in a single hour than he had received in six years of streaming.
However, all these digital collaborations ended up in turn affecting real-life connections, where streamers with different languages started appearing on each other’s channels, in the main goal of taking down the huge French that appeared on the third day when Americans were still asleep.
Over 72 hours, the political economy of Place had plenty of time to become as layered and complex as it is in real life, thanks to the direct democracy style of expression, similar to the upvote/downvote Reddit system; especially with materialism-based expansions of the color palette and the surface.
All types of cultures had their chances of immortalizing their online presence in a simple visual two-dimensional medium that has since become its own message of poiesis, as it can be experienced as a map, a territory, a story, a multiplicity of stories, or in a more encompassing way: a pluriverse. Like in reality, this is not a one-world world but a world of many worlds.
However, I must point out that, like with the internet in general, many believe “bots” are running rampant, which almost caused WW3 between France and Spain as millions of users were literally defending/attacking national flags. Like in reality it is impossible for humans to operate beyond morality. r/Place utopia is also asymptotic, and the Spectacle will prevail over virtuality in any way possible, especially domination.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit and takeaway is the power of human creativity, socialization and collectivism in general, especially as a counter to the popular perception of the internet as a fractured, fragmented and divisive medium. And as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium and the message are one and the same.
The multiplicity of messages of this project — in other words, the plurimessage — are all neatly archived on The Atlas of r/Place.
The QR code that takes you to The Atlas is also conveniently embedded in the canvas:
Sorry, but I had to! I’m just kidding. Rickrolling, if you will.
You can find the interactive map right here:
https://place-atlas.stefanocoding.me
In conclusion, r/Place is not only one of the richest worldmaking projects in history, but it’s also the epitome of Visual Culture thanks to its potential as a self-sustaining simulacrum where passion and cooperation are in a complete symbiosis of semiotics.
As Place’s Reddit account wrote after the end of the experiment: Maybe the real art was the friends we made along the way.
However, the question remains: Will we have Pixel Wars 2023 this coming April Fool’s?
