What if you woke up one day and the Gateway of India was spraypainted with a rendering of van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’? It may sound like a vandal’s wet dream, but it is already a reality on Wplace, a new artsy website that allows users to create pixel art using Google Maps and MS Paint and paint their city red, white, and green without getting a ticket.
Colourful, chaotic, and collaborative, think of Wplace as a public server where you create little pixels of art on a global map. Sign in and you get to paint in 32 colours on every nook and cranny of the globe. Feel like festooning your college building with Super Mario mushrooms on your office commute? You can do it here. Leave space for your friend to sketch Che Guevara on the same building? Why not?
Wplace is the kind of space where every new user begins with a small, fixed number of pixels (about 60)—or more if you wait longer. The more you colour and contribute, the more pixels are made available to you. People have come together to create a floating Laufey over Iceland, a flag of Palestine over Gaza, and even some Squid Game art over Seoul. That’s the sort of creativity you can expect on this platform.
Launched in July, Wplace is popular in graffiti hotspots like Germany and Brazil, but it’s finally gaining traction in India. If you zoom in on Delhi, you’ll spot a portrait of actor Assad Zaman from Interview with a Vampire, an outsized Indian flag, a Charizard cartoon, and a red font celebrating Delhi heavy metal band Bloodywood. Just off the coast of Mumbai is an array of pride flags, while the island city is choc-a-block with fan art celebrating the Mumbai taxi, Sachin Tendulkar, and the city’s Parsi population, among thousands of other things. Hyderabad, besides a photo of SS Rajamouli and Samantha Ruth Prabhu, has a massive Robert Pattinson’s Batman overlooking the city.
“Something about Club Penguin penguins drawn on Penguin Island tells me I can really rely on anonymous creativity to create wonders,” says Sudipta Choudhury, a securities lawyer in Mumbai, who recently joined the platform. “Non-competitive artistic expression really brings us together. Remember the crying-earth ‘Say No to Plastic’ graphics we’d paint in primary school? This website is as if everyone has a free lunch hour and some spare watercolour just lying around,” she adds about its chaotic appeal.
Do you recall the lively chaos of Pokémon GO from 10 years ago? With it, we stopped scrolling and headed out, leaves and branches crunching, technology and balmy air colliding in supreme beauty. With Wplace, we are still stuck to the screens, but it’s no longer for an endless day of doomscrolling. It is to create.
It may not be obvious when you see it, but every map painting takes a lot of time (and sometimes a lot of hands). The average person also underestimates how much they suck at painting. But here, that is totally fine. “When I first opened Wplace, it seemed like I had walked into a party where everyone had traded their drinks for crayons,” says Mehek Malhotra, creative lead for India at design platform Canva and founder of Giggling Monkey Studio.
Referring to the mysterious brown digital blob taking over the Yamuna in Delhi, which possibly resembles its actual state, Malhotra sees Wplace as a digital hangout for creatives. “That’s the most human way to work together: no emails, no meeting requests, just gut feeling and colour. You are strangely charitable because your patch is so small. You have to choose: should I use my pixels to make a work of art or leave room for a stranger who wants to draw a cloud?” When you zoom in on cities like New York and London, every single dot is aflame with blisters of furious missives about their president or king, there are smooth rats organising a political rally, rare emoji, maps of Bolivia, the opening credits of Mad Men… But it’s not all frivolity.
All around JK Rowling’s house in Scotland is an ever-increasing sash of transgender pride flags, a digital protest against her politics that lately have come off as tone-deaf and bigoted. Equally heart-warming is the sea of hearts (and Palestinian flags) that has flooded the strip on Earth known as Gaza. It shows how Wplace users have the shared intuition, vision, and sympathy to get it done.
Missed the news? Login here. Wplace is like watching thought bubbles highlighted in the maddest pigments in real time. It is very much a mirror image of the real world, replete with borrowed imaginations (how kids trace and draw popular cartoon characters rather than their own original designs) and derivative memes. Yes, you may not see the next Picasso emerge in this pixeldom, but the general observation is that when we truly become anonymous, we’re almost compelled to draw political art that would get us banned otherwise. And in that lies its biggest strength, making Wplace the most authentic space on the internet.
But like real life, zooming around on Wplace can be mildly anxiety-inducing, because you really want to see and remember everything but deep down realise it is impossible. All that’s left is to see whether there will be a time when all four trillion and some pixels will have been used up. What would our world look like, if we could see every thought our fellow global citizens thought was important enough to share? Wplace gives us a peek. And a warning. But mostly, lots and lots of confetti.
