Be a part of my social art experiment
Years ago, I came across a website that had a very interesting idea. There was a big 'canvas' on the page and you could click any pixel in the canvas to change its color. Once you did that, you were blocked from changing any other pixels for 24 hours. Everyone interacted with the same canvas, therefore, the complete image you were seeing was the product of everyone who had clicked on that canvas. Even though there was this chaos brought about by the fact that no one person had any control over the direction the image took, recognizable pictures did take form.
It's a psychological thing; if a few people put yellow dots in a top corner, you might think of a sun and start adding more yellow dots. Eventually people will be adding yellow dots just to make a recognizable shape appear there, until there is an actual sun. The a few people might get the idea to add a face to that sun and, without knowing each other's action, will end up contributing to it. Then, when there is a recognizable picture, others will come along, realize there is nothing to do but destroy what is currently there, and start making other random dots. In this way, the process continues forever.
I thought this was very cool and recently I decided to implement this on Facebook. I call it "Social Art." Currently I am only using a black and white 10×10 canvas with no time limit on edits, but hopefully the app will grow, and when it does I'll scale with the growth. Even with just a few more users I can at least do a 30 second or 1 minute lock on edits for each user, which should make the whole thing more interesting. In the meantime, I just need some people to get in there and check it out. You can send feedback via Facebook message or just post it here in the comments.
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