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American Guernica

The hive-mind Seurat

A year ago a wrote a piece for Slate called “Art Mobs”, in which I wondered whether it would be possible for a smart mob to create a work of visual art. I noted the example at Typophile, where a web designer allowed people to vote on individual pixels as they attempted to design a font or draw a picture of a goat. (The Typophile project appears to be dead now, unfortunately.)

Typophile offered only a relatively small grid, and the only possible pixel colors were black and white. So I was intrigued to see a new project called Pixelfest — which offers the same collaborative concept, except with a way bigger grid and pixels in a dizzying array of colors.

The emerging picture appears to be a sunny landscape with a tree! That’s the sun excerpted above; click here to see the whole thing. It’s quite mesmerizing: A democratized version of pointillist style.

(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson