This research aims to understand the following problem: how an analysis of the online social experiment, r/place, can help us utilize the field of the arts to comprehend productions and online phenomena not yet contemplated. For this purpose, the following objectives were established: identify r/place in this 2017 and 2022 editions, trace an analysis methodology for online phenomena, analyze r/place using such methodology and relate r/place with artistic phenomena with peculiar characteristics that puts them on the frontier of formal art thinking. To identify r/place, a literature review about the experiment was conducted, both in his 2017
and 2022 editions, and noted a void of works that studied it, concentrated on the field of arts. As an analysis tool, the hybrid triangular analysis methodology (MATH), was created to understand online phenomena, such as r/place, on three branches: behaviour, as understood under the Artification theory of Ellen Dissanayake, the technique, based on Lev Manovich’s theory on the roles of software, and image, based on studies of art and technology by Stephen Wilson and Christiane Paul. As such, r/place was analyzed following these three characteristics, noting the artified behaviour by its participants, exhibiting the five aesthetic operations as
described by Dissanayake, identifying the role of software and technical choices applied by its developers during the event, and how their intentions overflowed to the functionalities of r/place and decisions made regarding software, and the image aspect, understood within the context of digital art as a result of an object (analogic or digital), that suffers from an intentional mediation of software, focusing on the specifics of r/place’s mediation, investigating the imagetic characteristics of the phenomena not as a static picture, but undergoing constant change, in great part thanks to said mediation. Alas, it was established the relation between r/place and two artistic expressions considered by me as on the frontier of the formal understanding of art,
the paraense non-architecture known as Raio Que o Para, and pixel art, not as na isolated piece
of art, but as an artistic medium, realizing the parallels between r/place and the ways to
comprehend said phenomena. The research concludes that the chosen objectives were
accomplished, and the analysis of r/place, based on the MATH, can help us utilize the field of
the arts to understand online phenomena located yet at the periphery of this area of knowledge
opening the possibility to, in the future, apply this methodology to similar productions
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