Your artwork can spread throughout this San Francisco alley

“We want to let everyone, the entire Internet, draw this street,” Hultquist says. “This will be a great kind of collaborative art project.”

The project is inspired by Reddit’s r/place, a 2017 April Fool’s joke turned community art project that allows users to alter a large digital canvas one pixel at a time. The result was a chaotic palette of images, memes and inside jokes.

Paint a Street will be more tightly regulated. Images appear on the website as small squares, and users’ votes act as a mechanism to animate them and determine the final ranking. At this point, just after the site launched, most submissions were rudimentary pixelated drawings with a digital tattoo look. Memes also appear, such as Pepe and Longcat.

Each submission will also be reviewed by our AI content moderation software which flags inappropriate images. Anything flagged will undergo manual review.

Will this moderation be enough to prevent the texture from turning into a collection of penis images?

“Everyone I talked to asked this question, so it’s a common question,” Hultquist says, noting that while the team won’t allow explicit images, they also can’t fully control what shapes may appear in the placement of all images. “Theoretically, you could draw like a really giant man if you coordinated with a large number of people. But I guess we’ll see if the Internet can do that.”

Technically, the resulting collage will not actually be painted on the sidewalk but will be placed as a large poster on the sidewalk.

“I think it’s going to be great,” says Stanton Glantz, a retired professor and neighbor who lives near the alley. “It will be a small part of the weirdness of San Francisco.”

The ultimate goal, Hultquist says, is to make the alley a place people want to go.

“Wouldn’t it be great if this was a tourist attraction in San Francisco?” Hultquist says. “We want to make this something that people go to because there’s this community mural that happened on the street, and it’s going to be there forever.”

For Hollingsworth, this art project is a best-case scenario for her high-cost dilemma. Initially skeptical of their offer to buy the land, she hired a lawyer who verified that the three actually had the money and were not just pranking her.

“They tell me that art is about bringing people together, and that’s a good thing,” Hollingsworth says. “Let’s get together. Let’s get inside and get together and have a good time and celebrate. I want to be a part of that.”

“I’m celebrating with a concert,” she adds, laughing. “My real estate lawyer and songwriter will come and sing for us.”