I’m expecting ponies. So many ponies.

that’s all so 2-D …

for some reason this post didn’t get federated to toast, weird

July 12th, 2024 @ 4am UTC (the countdown is also on the website – https://canvas.fediverse.events)

It came to me today that I should play the devil’s advocate. Everyone who comments seems to like this, therefore there has to be someone to take the job of un-hypeing it. So this is just a different POV … because I can.

It’s a kind of social experiment which could be fun for some. The idea is to try to make a drawing with very limited resources (a single pixel per message, perhaps a few hundred pixels over a couple of days), and concurrently with hundreds/thousands of participants.

The outcome is less an artwork than it is a work of art that shows the (dire) state of collective creativity and imaginative capabilities of people who have been “rised” in dominance-hierarchic, competition-centric, societies: imagine one of these squatted houses where the walls quickly get filled with tags and political messages. While they in theory could have collectively put on an artwork that really speaks, they’d rather endulge in “us vs. them” group think, competing for the space and overdrawing each others messages.
– Thus, in a “canvas” action, those who can captivate the minds of the masses, and those who have the proficiency to have armies of machines fight for them, will win the most space. People will say this is fun but it’s rather the same as in politics. The outcome is perhaps pretty or hilarious in some details but it’s mostly logos and flags and symbolism, flat colours and two-dimensional cartoon caracters. So rather boring; rarely one will see a detail where one would say, “wow, someone really did put some thought and skill into this”.

Regarding me, I could imagine taking part in a project to create a bot that would facilitate collective decision making (about division of labour among drawing project participants and on-the-fly decisions about how to interact with neighbouring bits – stop at boundary, colour-mix, or overdraw – and drawing of colour-dithered, possibly three-dimensional, pre-planned graphic design (or algorithmic graphics), while at the same time automating the tedious sending of draw commands from many locations (it’s the most inefficient way one could do it but who cares in times of HD video streaming).
… Another fun idea that just pops into my mind, would be programming a “game of life” automaton which respects pixels that are already occupied, or overdraws them then re-draws them in their original colour. It could be made to completely vanish until closure time. :-D

Did you ever participate in r/place?

It’s pretty much the same thing. Each user can place a pixel every few minutes, and over a few days, an artwork appears.

This was the 2023 result: