Reddit’s massive /r/place art experiment remains one of the most remarkable collaborative endeavors I’ve ever seen on the internet. Screw you, museums: this is really modern art.
It’s dizzying to look at it and try to make sense of the many, many, different references, pictures, flags, and symbols painted into /r/place. Luckily, an enterprising group of people put together an atlas.
When Bryan wrote about it, the /r/place canvas was still being worked on. It was one of many April Fool’s gimmicks we’d picked through that day in order to find something that sounded like authentic news. It looked like an amorphous mass with only a few recognizable shapes appearing out of the chaos.
It’s only as you pull back and see /r/place as a complete whole that you realize how extraordinary the experiment turned out. There are so many intricate designs, so many massive projects that couldn’t possibly have been completed without the cooperation of hundreds — or thousands — of people.
Sure, there are still some places where the chaos of having everyone spam colored tiles overwhelms the order of the different pieces of art — those are called “The Void” by the atlas.
But other than those places, you can lose yourself for hours in the many intricacies Reddit painted on its giant canvas.
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