Welcome to wplace: A chaotic, collaborative 4‑trillion‑pixel canvas where users 'paint the world'
Launched July 21, the gamified global map fills with fan art and messages as users under pseudonyms build everything from stick figures to detailed tributes.
A newly launched website called wplace invites users to "paint the world" on an expansive, more than 4‑trillion‑pixel digital canvas, producing a chaotic, collaborative map of drawings and messages that spread across geographic regions. Since the site went live on July 21, users have covered the plane with everything from crude stick figures to highly detailed fan art and memorials.
Images of Icelandic singer Laufey hover over Reykjavík while tributes to the late Tejano star Selena Quintanilla cluster around Corpus Christi, Texas. The crest of San Lorenzo and other soccer club insignias fill sections of Buenos Aires, "Squid Game" fan art appears near Seoul, and a passage from the opening monologue of the series "Breaking Bad" sits close to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The site functions as a gamified global map: users, typically operating under online pseudonyms, claim pixels and collaborate or compete to place images in particular coordinates. Contributions vary widely in style and scale, with some areas dominated by simple lettering or single-color blocks and others featuring detailed, multi-hued illustrations built over time by groups of contributors.
"It's wild, and chaotic and crude," said Yotam Ophir, a University at Buffalo professor of communication who studies digital spaces. He described wplace as a form of "rebellion" against the increasingly curated and monetized mainstream internet, while noting that the project is more a reminder of what online creativity can look like than a threat to major social platforms.
Wplace follows a lineage of internet collaborative art experiments that used shared canvases and limited edits to encourage emergent community behavior. Notable precedents include Reddit's r/place experiments, which drew widespread attention in 2017 and again in 2022 for their sprawling, user-driven mosaics. Like those projects, wplace has become a stage for competing groups, fan communities and individuals to stake visual claims.
Observers say such projects often reveal the values and alliances of participating communities as much as they produce artwork. The mix of memorials, pop‑culture tributes and local symbols on wplace underscores how global trends and regional loyalties can coalesce in a single digital space. The relative anonymity afforded by pseudonyms and the informal, ad hoc organization of contributors have allowed both cooperative and adversarial interactions to shape the evolving map.
As the canvas fills, contributors continue to add and overwrite images, and the overall composition shifts with the ebb and flow of attention. Project creators and users have positioned wplace as an open, unpredictable experiment in large-scale, real-time collaboration that highlights both the creativity and the disorder that can emerge when thousands of people share a single digital surface.
For now, wplace remains a lively example of collective online expression: sprawling, messy and constantly changing, it offers a snapshot of how people use simple tools to make complex, shared works in public digital spaces.