The Smaller Picture

                    
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The collective consciousness was attempting to create a flag.

This picture is now closed.

You can browse the history of this picture, or view it as an animation.

New pictures being created :
human head cat bird sword castle sofa apple

Previous pictures :
spider anything lamp goat cup banana spiral boat wineglass stick person circle question mark heart bee arrow map of the world face monster house chair landscape telephone umbrella star flower Great Britain computer bucket letter fish anything car word tree television

Created by Kevan Davis in July 2002, based on Kevin Kelly's account of hive-mind audience emergence.
Each picture starts from a randomised grid. There have been 15443 flips to this one, so far.
See also: the official Typophile Font spinoff and Tom Rankin's filtering of it.

Other people have built much better emergent art projects
since this went live in 2002, most notably Swarm Sketch, Pixelfest and TheBroth.