To commemorate the 25th Game Developer’s Conference, iam8bit was invited to conceive of something swanky that would engage festival-goers.

Art installation meets social experiment, “Painting with Pixels” is a tribute to the perseverance of the pixel through several decades of gaming culture. Each conference attendee was gifted a single pixel (exactly 2×2 inches) to contribute to a 20-by-8-foot pop portrait by famed designer Jude Buffum. Through the course of the convention’s week long run, the large-scale image revealed itself (all 5,760 pixels of it), illustrating the true power of collaboration.

This time lapse is compiled from 40 hours of footage captured from February 28 - March 4, 2011.