On October 1st 1949, Chairman Mao announced the founding of the People's Republic of China at Tian'anmen Rostrum and declared the coming of the new era of China. Tian'anmen Square began to be seen as the symbol of China since then and becomes an important constituent part of the National Emblem of China. Covering an area of 440,000 square meters, located in downtown Beijing, Tian'anmen Square is the largest city square in the world.

Every moment the tourists' souvenir photos are posted from Tian'anmen Square through social media, it can be a crowd sourcing pinhole to this place.

Tian'anmen Pinhole used to be an interactive online website allowed users to explore the meaningful moments, which were intellectually selected by individual tourists, over the Square. The site was taken down later due to a contract issue.

One day, no any photo was posted from Tian'anmen Square in 2013.

Every 24 hours, photos were collected into the column bars and sequenced by the posting time, 0:00am to 24:00pm, from top to the bottom. Users could manipulate their view by zooming and mouse actions to look through Tian'anmen Square in micro and macro.

This interactive platform was created in the national day holiday when the Beijing and Tian'anmen was much on my mind. It conveyed the color changing of that biggest sky: with crowd sourcing photos. Tourists post more photos in the blue sky days which are getting rarer now.

The photos posted from Tian'anmen Square on October 2nd 2013 show the delicate color changing of sky over 24 hours.

The photos posted from Tian'anmen Square on October 3rd 2013.

The photos posted from Tian'anmen Square on October 3rd 2013. In a hazy day, the quantity of photos is comparatively less than a regular day.

Although we made the Pinhole as a crowd sourcing photo visualization experiment, we've surprised by the possibilities journalists use it for: new thread exploration on this politically sensitive space. Because the censored photos also implies.

This project was stopped when coding finished at the end of 2013.

Check out the following short video to see the demo:

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