I’m a sucker for Reddit. I love r/AmItheAsshole, r/MaliciousCompliance, and r/JustNoMIL just to name a few of the subreddits I frequent. Also the ones with all the cute eye bleach animal videos. More recently, this one subreddit was added and I was mildly curious. You can only place 1 color square every 5 minutes. And apparently, this only lasted for 4 days. It’s over now.
It was such an interesting project though! People were openly defending their art pieces as a group. And you certainly couldn’t make anything by yourself. Even if you made multiple Reddit accounts. My favorite thing to do while this was going on was to go around the canvas and fix any spots that trolls had messed up. Since I wasn’t really invested in any specific thing on the piece.
Since the canvas had a finite size and was only available for 4 days. The space was limited and people had to protect their “pieces”. One thing I noticed was a bit upsetting. Some streamers would encourage their followers to go in and take over a space. Like the screenshot above. There were also a few streamers that encouraged people to blank out spaces randomly. So at any given point in the day, large black blobs would suddenly splash across the art piece.
I suppose this was an artistic part of the whole project? People had to rally together to protect something they wanted to stay visible… for the people who were willing to look at the piece. I was cruising the subreddit after everything was over and there were even people who made the piece into hoodies or shirts. It’s a bit endearing.
If you’re curious to check this out yourself a bit, feel free to head over to r/place on Reddit. I took some screenshots of what it looked like about midway through. I’m not sure how much it changed. But it was a really interesting couple of days. Thanks for stopping by and reading my post today!
Atelier Whootique 