Paintyourpizza.com is an app that lets you "paint" a pizza on your computer using something that looks an awful lot like Microsoft paint, then pay for that pizza and have it delivered to you in all of its terrible glory. The program gives you the option of painting collaboratively with other users or to bogart an entire pie canvas yourself. The artist behind this bizarre collision between performance art, collaborative art and technology, is Jonas Lund a Swedish born artist working out of New York City/Amsterdam.
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Paintyourpizza.com was unveiled at Eyebeam's Annual Showcase in New York. In an interview with ANIMAL, Lund describes the resulting pizzas as "entrepreneurial art" and notes that the pizzas sold very well.
Before you get too excited know this: The pizza you paint and order will run you $40 and there are currently no pizza joints willing to process deliveries at the time of this writing. The webpage claims we should check back tomorrow to see if any pizzerias are accepting orders but we're going to guess Papa John's, Tempe isn't going to be partnering with Jonas Lund for national service anytime soon. Still, we can hope that this one day becomes a reality if only for the infinite but expensive pranks you could pull.
You can however, still use the app to paint fantastical pizzas and view the pizzas that have already been made. Some, like Angry Pizza are actually really impressive given the limitations of the app used to create the art. At the same time a brief parsing of the gallery would indicate that "penor (NSFW)" is representative of about 10% of the entries submitted. Granted penis pictures and declaration to eat various penises probably do make up at least 10% of everything on the internet so perhaps this is simply an accurate reflection of society. Before you dismiss the artist merit of anything created with basic computer paint tools, take a moment to see what people have managed to accomplish given limited tools but plenty of time.
Lund's previous effort in this unique medium was an app called Paintshop.biz which allowed users to use a similar set of tools to collaboratively paint pictures that could be signed and claimed at anytime by any of the collaborators. Once signed the painting would be posted in an internet gallery and put up for sale. Proceeds from the sale were split 50/50 between artists and gallery. Reportedly, this effort was significantly less successful as only three of the 3000 or so images created were actually sold.