Ten thousand Dutch people make Night Watch on Reddit
This ‘pixelated’ version of the Night Watch is prominently featured on Reddit, but it took ten thousand Dutch people and a lot of organization.
For fanatical Redditors, April 1 was a celebration: r/Place returned. The first major announcement of r/Place was in 2017, when it was intended that large works of art could be made of a certain number of pixels. Anyone could join and anyone could post a pixel, with a time limit.
r/Place
Before April 1, 2022, r/Place returned. If you go to that address (via our link or reddit.com/r/place) you will see a large canvas at the top. As mentioned, anyone can place a pixel (in one of the sixteen 16-bit colors). If you do that, you have to wait five minutes until you can place another pixel, so that it can be regulated a bit to a certain extent.
Nightwatch on Reddit r/Place
As you can see there are gigantic works of art made of several thousand pixels on r/Place. How do you do that if you can only place a pixel once every five minutes, without someone else taking your spot? For that, some things have to be organised. How does that work? We know this from a Dutch impact on r/Place. At the bottom left is Rembrandt van Rijn’s Night Watch and a VOC ship (which is also a work of art? The undersigned does not know him). A pretty impressive (and big!) piece of pixel art. It consists of about 10,000 pixels and if you are only allowed to place a pixel once every five minutes, it can take a while.
Great organization
That is why there is not one person, but about ten thousand people behind De Nachtwacht on Reddit. This is what Groningen student Billy Laarakkers reports to Nu.nl. He is one of the organizers of the posting of De Nachtwacht. They have a Discord server where everything is communicated on. Not only with the ten thousand pixel artists, but also with other organized groups on r/Place to coordinate where De Nachtwacht can be placed and, perhaps more importantly, that no other group paints their pixel art over Van Rijn’s work.
Preparation and maintenance
When it became clear that r/Place was reopening, the planning began. A spreadsheet version of The Night Watch was designed so that it would look good in pixels. When r/Place opened and the spots were distributed, the ‘army’ of ten thousand men went wild on the pixels and everyone had to place one without exceeding that time limit.
We say ‘army’ because it really is a kind of world. Laarakkers explains that every ‘community’ is really seen as a country on r/Place. Every country has diplomats. Subsequently, alliances have been formed with several countries and these include stopping attacks. So if someone hard-handedly tries to vandalize De Nachtwacht, several countries will stop it. So there is more behind it than just placing pixels. The ultimate goal is to leave Dutch culture on r/Place shine† To keep The Night Watch intact before r/Place closes again on Tuesday, a number of Redditors stay up all night. You just have to talk about it!
