placeDE involvement

place is a social experiment, made by Josh Wardle at Reddit, originally meant as an April Fool’s joke. It was hosted in 2017, 2022 and 2023. In the beginning, there’s an empty canvas and every user can place one pixel every five minutes. All three iterations started at 1000x1000 pixel and 8 available colors, with 2022 and 2023 increasing the size and color palette incrementally over time, with each event lasting only a couple of days. Naturally, this leads to communities organizing themselves to create big artworks. The bigger and organized a community, the bigger and better the artwork on the canvas.

I was very fascinated by the project in 2017, at the time I was helping place pixels for a small game community and spent my time looking around the canvas and following what users did. I had already gathered some experience with pixelart beforehand, but after the event had ended, I spent more time getting better at it. One of my artworks even got featured in the community tab of the game I had originally contributed to on the canvas. My work eventually landed me a gig at BDcraft.net, one of the most popular Minecraft Resource Pack makers at the time, where I was able to earn my first real money ever. Unfortunately, that project was never finished and I lost interest in pixelart.

In 2022 I noticed the Reddit app icon changing to a pixelated version on my phone’s home screen. And to my absolute surprise, it was another iteration of place! Naturally, I was very intrigued - the event had only just begun and I saw the first traces of a German flag, leading me to search up the German place community placeDE. I quickly started making my first artwork: Der Elefant and Die Maus from the German educational children’s TV series Die Sendung mit der Maus, later also adding Die Ente to complete the character line-up.

/ Bild /

I continued helping to organize the community and making more artworks. Soon, I became one of the leaders, with a primary focus on the art-side of it. At the end of day 1, I was crowned the MVP (most valuable player) for my efforts.

/ Bilder /

/ Reception, Zahlen, Youtube Videos, organigramm /

/ 2023 /

• show pixelarts
• link reddit post with organigramm
• mvp, write a bit about my involvement