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irl/place
irl/place is inspired by the online social experiment r/place, first launched on Reddit in 2017. On the original platform, users could place a single pixel on a massive digital canvas every few minutes. Millions of people around the world collaborated (and competed) to create flags, memes, portraits, logos, and chaotic clashes of color. It became a living snapshot of online culture, a massive artwork authored by thousands.
This project brings that idea into the physical world. Instead of pixels, we use 1 cm × 1 cm glass mosaic tiles. Instead of screens, we use a gallery vitrine. The digital is reimagined as the tangible, and virtual becomes the physical.
Pixel art, long tied to early video games, memes, and pop-culture nostalgia, has become a recognized genera of art in line with pointillism, minimalism or abstraction. By translating pixels into tiles, irl/place highlights both the collective power of crowdsourced creation and the cultural shift between online immediacy and physical actuality, in real life.
Rules of Play
- Take a tile from the supply provided.
- Choose your place: You may add your tile anywhere on the grid.
- Change is allowed: You may also remove or replace tiles placed by others. Nothing here is fixed.
- Work alone or together: Participants can collaborate in groups or act individually.
- No limits: Unlike the online version, there is no time restriction and no maximum number of tiles you can place.
- Respect the space: While you may overwrite or rearrange, please do so thoughtfully — remember, every decision becomes part of the shared history of the piece.
- The artwork never ends: The image is always changing, a document of the people who participate.
