Meet the creators of the r/place Atlas, the internet’s living mural
When time ran out for Reddit’s collaborative internet mural, r/place, people could still place pixels — but only white ones. Kicking off on April Fools’ Day, groups of Redditors spent four days cooperating and competing for space on the mural. By the final day, it had become a crowded and beautiful collection of flags, fandom references, and inside jokes. But all too quickly it began to disappear back into a pristine canvas.
Luckily, the same community spirit that went into the r/place canvas also went into preserving it. Even before Reddit released the official final capture, ordinary users had been collecting their own screenshots and timelapses, and sharing them on the platform. This included fun recreations and experiments — for example, what if every black pixel ever placed had been permanent — which became popular on the subreddit, where users still hung out, even without a canvas to work on.
These preservation efforts include the 2022 r/place Atlas, an ambitious attempt to fully document this year’s canvas. The site hosts the full canvas, and displays descriptions of whatever area is being hovered over. It’s also possible to search entries for keywords and find the associated areas of the mural that way.
Creating it has been a collaborative experience. Users can submit information about any image within the mural, its background, and the group that created it. The Atlas is popular because groups had formed to work together on r/place, in the first place, lead developer Stefano Haagmans said. “R/place is such a big project for some people that they just created literal communities for it,” said Haagmans. “And because of it, people enjoy it when it’s categorized, when it’s archived.”
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