Can You Spot Malta’s Contribution In This Incredible Virtual Painting?
Social network behemoth and self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” Reddit launched what many are calling the internet’s best experiment yet in the form of an April Fool’s project called Place, and Malta managed to join the huge virtual experiment.
Place was a blank canvas that Reddit offered to all its anonymous users, with very simple rules. Each user could choose one tiny pixel from 16 colours to place anywhere on the canvas. Users could place as many pixels of as many colours as they wanted, but had to wait a couple of minutes between placing each one.
Over the next three days, the collaborative artwork which emerged shocked even its inventors. As Sudoscript put it, “Each pixel you see was placed by hand. Each icon, each flag, each meme created painstakingly by millions of people who had nothing in common except an Internet connection. Somehow, someway, what happened in Reddit over those 72 hours was the birth of Art.”
“The Final Canvas”
And while factions were being formed, multiple flags, logos and memes quickly started showing up. Hundreds of people (and dozens of hours) were required to bring these designs to life and defend their position on the canvas, and Place very quickly ended up becoming an online battle for territory.
Amongst all this chaos, however, a relatively tiny but distinguishable Maltese flag showed up in the final moments, managing to make it to the final product.
Considering the George Cross alone is about 20 pixels large (which would’ve taken 20 people a minute to complete or one person a whole hour to do so), Malta’s contribution must have actually been a pretty sizeable one.
Each and every single pixel in the huge final canvas has a story (or twelve) to tell, but we’d like to take this opportunity to salute the Maltese creators that not only took part in this artistic orgy, but managed to make it to the end product.