The Internet's Greatest Art War

The subreddit r/place was first created as an art project and social experiment on April Fools’ day in 2017 and has since been revived for a second time five years later on the same day in 2022.

The rules are simple. Each user can place one tile, a single pixel from a 16-color palette, on a 1000×1000 canvas every five or so minutes.

This year, r/place reached around 3.3 million users, over three times that in 2017, prompting the canvas to double in size to 2000×2000 alongside 16 new colors. People from all corners of the internet, including Discord servers, subreddits, and Twitch channels, quickly formed alliances in an effort to leave their mark on the canvas before its eventual end date. The result was a melting pot of memes, pop culture references, and the truly bizarre.

https://hypebeast.com/2022/4/reddit-r-pl...iment-info

The Life and Death of r/Place, Home to the Internet's Greatest Art War

Over the course of four days, Redditors battled across an open canvas. Until the void came for them all.

What is r/Place?

r/Place is a social experiment that launched on Reddit back in 2017. Its founder, Josh Wardle (founder of Wordle, ever heard of it?) called r/Place "a screenshot of the Internet at this moment in time." Five years later, on April 1, 2022, the subreddit made its massive and triumphant return. r/Place offers a giant, open canvas that allows anyone and everyone to place one colored pixel. Each pixel has its own timer, meaning no individual or group can endlessly spam their shapes, which forces either coordination between users (if you want beauty), or absolute chaos, if that's what you're into. r/Place mixes art, teamwork, and sheer randomness into an awe-inspiring tapestry that the designer in me finds truly beautiful.

There's been wars between communities, countries, and streamers hilarious and frightening shows of force. One thing that's for sure? This was some of the most fun I’ve had on the Internet in years.

The White Void

On Monday evening, r/Place came to a random, stunning end. The community was suddenly left with only one color option: White. The r/Place community proceeded to erase all of the work they did over the weekend. It was surprisingly sweet and reflective, wonderfully concluding a phenomenal experiment. Like many of r/Place's admirers, I hope it becomes a yearly thing, opposed to something we only see every half decade. r/Place brought new collaborations between streamers, broke language barriers, gave way to more than a few incredible stories, and created some damn fine art while doing it. I can't wait to see what could possibly rival the Dick Meteor next year.

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a39636...explained/

I remember a similar concept on a website several years before that subreddit. It worked well too. Good ideas can always be rebooted cool stuff

I remember a similar concept on a website several years before that subreddit. It worked well too. Good ideas can always be rebooted cool stuff

There's rumors of making it a yearly event. And I heard it takes up a lot of bandwidth.

Image Classification in HTP Test Based on Convolutional Neural Network Model

The HTP test itself is also part of a wider genre of drawing-based tests, which grew and built upon each other over about a hundred years of psychology. The origin for all of it started in 1885, when a draughtsman and art teacher named Ebenezer Cooke first noticed that children pass through stages in their artistry, starting with abstract scribbles, winding through basic shapes and symbols, and slowly becoming able to reproduce the human figure. He published a paper about this progression and how art should be taught to children both for its own sake and to increase their education and intelligence. The book was a hit with teachers, who began looking at drawing as a way to both teach and evaluate their students.

The idea of the HTP test is that certain groups of people will share certain artistic conceits, like the need to draw a male figure rather than a female one, or the tendency to draw a wizened tree rather than a robust one. Some psychologists note that schizophrenic patients often have trouble with the test, depicting houses as having arms and legs, and adding double features, like two noses, to the human figures.

The test has problems. Originally done in the 1940s, and redone in the 1960s, many feel it lacks the comprehensiveness it needs to be a diagnostic tool. Drawings from only about 140 people were used to set the standards. In some diagnostic categories women far outnumbered men, and in others it was the other way around. The people were generally from a homogeneous racial and social group. It certainly can't stand on its own.

Still, the technique of using drawings to indicate mental state has expanded in some interesting ways. Some psychologists use the HTP test before and after major life changes to see how a subject has changed their outlook. For example, one study of people doing the test before and after surgery indicated that before surgery people regressed — drawing their houses as cottages, their trees as saplings, and their people as children. After surgery, they drew adult humans, full grown trees, and larger houses.

Variations of the test proliferate.

https://gizmodo.com/the-frightening-resu...-520554447

H T P house tree person, administration, scoring and interpretation

https://youtu.be/pcRpBpJxpGg

HTP test in psychometrics is a widely studied and applied psychological assessment technique. HTP test is a kind of projection test, which refers to the free expression of painting itself and its creativity. Therefore, the form of group psychological counselling is widely used in mental health education. Compared with traditional neural networks, deep learning networks have deeper and more network layers and can learn more complex processing functions. In this stage, image recognition technology can be used as an assistant of human vision. People can quickly get the information in the picture through retrieval. For example, you can take a picture of an object that is difficult to describe and quickly search the content related to it. Convolutional neural network, which is widely used in the image classification task of computer vision, can automatically complete feature learning on the data without manual feature extraction. Compared with the traditional test, the test can reflect the painting characteristics of different groups. After quantitative scoring, it has good reliability and validity. It has high application value in psychological evaluation, especially in the diagnosis of mental diseases. This paper focuses on the subjectivity of HTP evaluation. Convolutional neural network is a mature technology in deep learning. The traditional HTP assessment process relies on the experience of researchers to extract painting features and classification.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/cin/2021/6370509/

A yearly event might be a good idea or do a website with multiple pages or themes.

A yearly event might be a good idea or do a website with multiple pages or themes.

And each pixel included a link back or do follow so it worked for both art and marketing. NFTs are relevant too.

Political or even current events would work too

It's like collective cyber dream done in real time.



https://www.reddit.com/r/place/



https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/..._ocean_of/

 

I remember a similar concept on a website several years before that subreddit. It worked well too. Good ideas can always be rebooted cool stuff

There's rumors of making it a yearly event. And I heard it takes up a lot of bandwidth.

Reddit Went Down on Second Day of /r/Place Artwork Experiment [Updated]

Watching the r/Place timelapse is like staring into the heart of Reddit
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/7/230154...f-timeline
Reddit Place (/r/place) - FULL 72h (90fps) TIMELAPSE
https://youtu.be/XnRCZK3KjUY