The Canvas event is the Fediverse’s take on the r/place event, I.E, a collaborative artwork where every participant can place down a single pixel every 30 seconds.
This limitation means the only way to assemble a larger piece of art is for people to come together in groups to collectively decide what they’ll be drawing, where it will be, and communicate with other groups working on neighboring artworks so as not to impede their efforts, or even to negotiate mutual aid treaties to help maintain each other’s art from potential hit-and-run attacks.
SLRPNK participated in 2024’s Canvas event, which @Five@slrpnk.net documented in one of our previous Monthly Meta’s.
If there are any Solarpunks interested in participating this year, this thread might be a good place to organize and collaborate :)
Sounds fun. So what’re we making this time? Would be willing to spend an hour or two into it
Not sure, really. Anyone can propose a template image here within the next 3 days, then decide which we like best (hopefully something that doesn’t use too many pixels so we can ensure that we can maintain it).
I’ll try to take a crack at drawing up something for us to follow if no one else does.
So I was thinking about making a template and I realized that the size of the piece we can make depends entirely on the ‘man-hours’ our instance members can contribute. As an example, if one person can give just one hour to the event, they can place ~100 pixels (not 120 since we’re not bots lol) so that’s a 10x10 space. So four people contributing 1 hour each or one person contributing 4 hours can enable us to make a 20x20 piece. And so on… So I was wondering if there is a way we can get a rough idea of our total ‘man-hours’ so we can make a decent sized piece? We can wing it and make a small one and then expand it / make more if we have more people but the former method might be more resource effecient maybe.
I’m not entirely sure how big we could realistically make it. It’s possible we’ll get some outside help once the event begins from our neighboring artworks, but probably best to assume low-ish participation, and be a bit restrained in size.
Guessing just on gut feeling, I think we could probably manage up to 30x30 okay, and maybe 40x40 if we get a few people who really get into it. My own proposal is 28x26.
Front page says slrpnk.net has 180 users/day. Maybe 10% of them would do canvas for a while? I don’t imagine even that many would commit an hour to obsessive pixel-clicking; maybe not even 100 times over the course of a day…
Hmmm, then maybe 900 pixels could be a reasonable template size; 30x30 or 25x36
I found that the Canvas event actually has stats available for how many pixels were placed by each instance in previous events, and how many users participated. In 2024, 13 of our users participated and placed 3100 pixels.
I think it’s best to be flexible - easy to scale up or down. It only takes a couple of people to get really excited, or to write a bot, and suddenly you get an enormous pixel budget. Start with something modest, then ramp up if there’s a lot of activity.
My recollection is that lemmy canvas is less confrontational than reddit, so less need to reserve pixels for defense.