PiXA (ピクサ)

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~ the goodbye ~

PiXA was an illustration site with its login wall in an unusual place. Joining was free and anyone could browse, but the site would not show you a picture at full size until you had registered. What registering got you was a profile assembled out of badges, which were small icons standing for the things you liked, and which sat beside your drawings as a searchable field like any other. The search box on every page offered illustrations, tags, usernames, titles and badges.

The public beta began in March 2009, after a closed round that the Japanese encyclopedia entry says ran for thirty invited accounts from 18 February. It was built by Content Innovation, a company whose other property was Filn, a social network aimed at the Akihabara crowd, which closed in November 2010. By the time PiXA died, operation had passed to a social-game developer called Sonar.

The site ran illustration contests tied to Houbunsha's Manga Time Kirara titles, and somewhere in its last stretch the developer blog dropped quietly out of the navigation bar. On 3 December 2012 a notice went up with a schedule that had exactly one line in it. Four days later the site stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the influx ~

In the summer of 2011 a dispute over a contemporary art group's use of pictures posted to pixiv pushed a wave of Japanese illustrators off that site. ITmedia's report names where they went, which was PiXA and a site called TINAMI. The encyclopedia entry puts the arrival at around 25 July and says the traffic ran at a hundred times the previous day's, a figure that carries no source at all.

What does carry a source is what PiXA was doing three days after that. At 09:02 on 28 July the operations desk posted that the emergency maintenance was over and service had resumed at 08:20, that the work had consisted of nothing but adding capacity to some of the servers, and that tuning would continue. A site forced to post an emergency maintenance notice because too many people turned up is having its best week and its worst week at once.

~ what the counter said ~

PiXA printed a popular-tags column down the side of every page with a running count beside each tag, which means the Archive's captures hold a census of the site taken on particular days. In late March 2009 the largest tag, the one for original work, stood at 318. On 28 July 2011, the morning the servers came back up, it read 10,908. On 4 December 2012 it read 13,325.

The column worth reading is the one underneath. The tag for fan art of licensed properties stood at 2,787 on the morning after the influx, and at 2,796 in the final week. Nine pictures in sixteen months. Original work kept arriving the entire time. The fan art had simply stopped.

~ a voice in your head ~

The closure notice was posted at 11:10 on 3 December 2012. It thanked everyone for what it called about three years, noted that the service had been running since March 2009, and gave the schedule, which was the single line 7 December, service stops. It gave no reason. It said nothing about getting your pictures out, and nothing about what would become of the ones left behind.

On the evening of 6 December the official account apologized that the site's connection trouble had never been completely fixed. The service ended during the afternoon of the seventh. At 15:49 the account posted that the team hoped one day to take what it had learned from PiXA and do something else with it. Then it posted a goodbye written in the cadence of a cartoon character speaking straight into the viewer's head, saying that PiXA might be closing but its soul would not vanish, and that users should go and draw and post the drawings somewhere else.

The domain stopped being PiXA quickly. By June 2013 the address that had carried the shutdown notice was serving a page offering pixa.cc for sale.

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