🎨 Reddit’s epic collaborative mural
R/place, street art, and the undeniable power of mark-making
We look at these essential qualities to a thriving mark-making ecosystem:
🤼 Enthusiastic public, visual promotion of yourself and your group
🔄 Agitating for limited and constantly changing space
💼 Evolving a system of norms and practices
R/place
Last weekend and into the beginning of this past week, one particular canvas captured the imagination of millions. Originally created in 2017 by Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle, r/place is a temporary digital image where each user can change the color of a single pixel every five minutes. As Taylor Lorenz wrote in the Washington Post,
Because each user can only place a single, tiny tile every five minutes, it’s impossible to build alone. The five-minute wait time throttles any single person’s ability to dominate the canvas. Users are instead forced to work together and build coordinated communities to produce collective works of pixel art.
R/place’s canvas has only ever been active for a few days, but the impromptu creativity and connection is off the charts. Scroll through the hi-res version of the final canvas and you’ll see representations of national pride, subreddits, memes, fine art, and lots and lots of fandom communities, of everything from sports and colleges to music and movies. The scale is mind-boggling: Lorenz says the canvas saw 72 million individual pixel changes last weekend.
For a lot of users, it’s clear that besides expression and mark-making, the point is the drama and excitement from turf wars and coordinated “raids” on the “territory” of other groups. This is on display in fascinating documents like this, the 27-page written history of r/thebluecorner in the 2022 r/place. Let me unpack that: this is a highly detailed retelling of how r/thebluecorner, a subreddit with nearly 18,000 subscribers, attempted to keep the bottom right corner of r/place a solid blue rectangle.
Compared to 2017, this year’s r/place was on a much larger canvas, and with many more available colors. (See an image comparing both years here.) According to Lorenz, one of the major qualitative differences between this year’s r/place and the first one five years ago, is “the rise of other community-oriented platforms like Discord and Twitch.” As we noted back in November, Discord is huge, and has gotten many times larger during the pandemic. It makes sense that when communities like r/thebluecorner wanted to privately scheme about their alliances and raids, a private group on Discord would be better suited to that than their open subreddit.
After four days, white became the only color available to users. Like Burning Man returning to the desert, the entirety of the image was quickly erased. (Watch a timelapse of the whole thing here, and read an explainer of some interesting details here.)
Style Wars and street art
While r/place surged with activity, this week the New_ Public team took a retreat in Brooklyn, New York. As you often do on a retreat, we did a team-building activity, and so we found ourselves walking into a graffiti class.
Near the Jefferson Street subway station in Bushwick, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of outdoor painted works on public and private walls. Even before the internet, street art spread throughout the world. I’ve been lucky enough to see street art in places like a former slaughter house in Rome and on remnants of the Berlin Wall in Berlin. Not far from my house in DC, the walls along the Metro’s Red Line are also a world-famous graffiti canvas.
Along the same lines as my interest in ghost signs, I’ve long been fascinated with the radical creativity and culture of graffiti and street art, and I traced some of its origins to one of my favorite documentaries.
The classic 1983 documentary feature Style Wars chronicles some of the early years of graffiti writing in New York City. Organized into crews, taggers aspire to go “all city,” meaning they tag a subway car on every train line in New York. Even though tagging is about self-promotion, it’s also about the community of artists. One artist, Skeme, says, “It’s for me and other graffiti writers — that we can read it. All these other people who don’t write, they’re excluded. I don’t care about them. They don’t matter to me. It's for us.” Tag writers are deferential to each other, not painting over each other’s tags. However, the city is constantly whitewashing the trains, and another clique of graffiti artists, the bombers, are only interested in ruining others’ elaborate tags.
Over decades, the spirit of the graffiti taggers would eventually evolve into the practice of elaborate, sanctioned murals and street art like that of the Bushwick Collective, which brings artists from around the world to where we took our class. To keep things fresh, they regularly repaint walls so more artists can get a turn. The point is still mark-making, but in a culture fascinated by documenting authentic, hand-made visuals on the internet.
It’s not unusual, especially on “permission” murals, to see Instagram username handles of the artists as part of the painting. When a mural is posted online, it can also be labeled with links to everyone who contributed. These artists use the collective to help them secure public, outdoor canvases, and they must share the finite space. But online, there’s a lot more canvas and a much larger audience.
The future of mark-making on the internet
I’m left wondering: is there a version of r/place that could exist as an ongoing, spatially-oriented social platform? What might moderation look like in this context? What does harmful, illegal, or low-quality content look like in pixels? R/place has blossomed and evaporated in the context of an April Fool’s joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a version of it that could lend itself to serious, even sophisticated, connection and expression.
There are lots of differences between r/place and 1980s graffiti or contemporary street art, but there’s also a lot that all three have in common: intense enthusiasm for visually promoting yourself and your group in public, fighting for limited and constantly changing space, and growing a system of rules and expectations. Many of these artists are just desperate to make a fleeting mark on their world and be acknowledged by the people they respect: each other. “It’s for us,” Skeme said in Style Wars.
I have no idea when I’ll next pick up a spray paint can, but I know that for a long time I’ll be thinking about these cultures and what we might be able to borrow from them to use in new digital public spaces.
Open Thread
Look out for an email on Tuesday at 12pm ET: we’re doing our monthly Open Thread! This month we’ll be talking about education, and building communities around parents and caregivers.
Throwing up wildstyles,
Josh
Screenshots of r/place from this post. Photo by Josh Kramer.
New_ Public is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.