Art as an Expanded Field: The Case of the R/Place Social Experiment

In this paper, we will present the social experiment originating from the website Reddit, r/place, and our findings regarding how this experiment has been analyzed and understood, with three interpretations of our studies that could be associated with r/place. On top of that, we will introduce our art research methodology, “art as an expanded field,” in which r/place will be our subject of analysis, with the concept of artification described by scholar Ellen Dissanayake as our theoretical starting point for such an endeavor. It is not in the interest of this work to thoroughly analyze r/place but to present a paradigm for understanding it and possibly further experiments, as well as present the beginnings of our methodology currently developed.