The World's Larget Image

by Craven Moorehead

The artist, known as Eggplant, is a software engineer by day. By night, he creates computer programs to generate images. And now, he’s made the largest digital image in human history. So what could it possibly depict? After all, NASA made a 680 Gigapixel image of the Moon. So did Eggplant make an image of the Sun? The solar system? No, he made an image of a human penis.

The Birth of an Idea

The story does not begin with Eggplant setting out to break records. He just wanted to make fun of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Finding them silly and their value proposition for the artworld dubious, he decided to take a crack at making one. It would be a satirical send up of the entire mania.

That’s when he first began thinking about size. If the image he made were so big that the average computer couldn’t open the file, that would be hilarious — digital art that was totally inaccessible but available to buy via blockchain. What sounded more like peak NFT craze than that?

Being an engineer, he set some ground rules for himself:

1. The art had to be unique, recognizable, and non-repeating. It wouldn’t be good enough to do the same section over and over again, as that would be way too easy.
2. If it was going to be big enough to crash a computer, it would need to be generated, but also have a claim to beauty. Since Eggplant works in generative art — building algorithms that create images — so this seemed a natural way to connect to his passion.
3. It needed to be fun. If he was going to do satire, it should go all the way.

Looking over the rules and thinking about his mission, Eggplant had a stroke of genius. What if he created an image of the world’s biggest penis?

In January 2022, The Eggplant set to work. He knew what he had to build.

The Image Grows

Eggplant used the programming language Python to construct algorithms capable of making an image of computer-crashing proportions. But fairly quickly he ran into road blocks.

Most incredibly large images you find online are not actually a single image. For instance, Google Earth is made up of many images all tiled together. That allows a computer to open a manageable collection of pictures, loading more as needed.

But Eggplant was creating a single, unified image. That puts an enormous amount of stress on a computer trying to load it all at once. And as the algorithms ran on, the project started to bump up against the hard reality of computing power.

It was around this point that Eggplant also realized something interesting — the largest image ever at that point

Race to Completion

As the image grew and grew, Eggplant had to scramble to gain the technical expertise to handle something so big. He scoured forums, subreddits, and contacted experts.

Of course, the sensitive nature of his project meant he had to go undercover. When asked why on earth someone would need an image dozens of terapixels big, he claimed at times to be an astronomer, GIS professional, microbiologist, and more.

Though he worked to catch up, catastrophe came. Eventually, the image burst through the TIFF image format specification he was working in. He had to essentially rework the format just to fit it all in. For reference, TIFF only allowed for images up to 2^32 pixels wide — or over four billion pixels. That wasn’t nearly big enough.

But with that fix in place, Eggplant was hopeful that he could complete his work. Eventually, after many computer crashes and many a crisis averted, his masterpiece was finished.

Just How Big is It?

What the artist christened The World’s Biggest Penis reached a final size of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels (or 102 terapixels).

Before this, it’s believed that the largest image ever was around or under one terapixel. By the end, Eggplant’s generated image of a penis overshot that by over a hundred times.

To view something that big requires special software. And even software designed for viewing large images can still break under the conditions of viewing this thing.

So how big does that make it in concrete terms? The scale of this image is truly cosmic.

If you set the base of the image on the surface of the Earth, it would span an entire soccer pitch. And its length would extend all the way to the Moon and still come back half way. That’s getting awfully close to the diameter of the Sun.

Surely, Eggplant felt an exhausted satisfaction when the image was finished. It was so big, and he’d made it. But he realized his task was not done. There was something he needed to do to make it official and share it with the world.

The Guinness World Record

What the artist christened The World’s Biggest Penis was ready for the history books. And so Eggplant sent in an application with Guinness World Records for the noted honor of creating the “Largest Digital Image.”

As of this writing, Eggplant is finishing up the steps needed to provide proof and expert testimonials. This is going well so far, as a PhD Astrophysicist working at Arizona State University has already come on board to confirm the size.

What does that all mean? It’s likely that, very soon, the largest image in the world will be widely known as a computer generated illustration of penis.

In a World of its Own

As far as art projects go, The World’s Biggest Penis stands in a category all its own. One can’t help but find it funny yet somehow profound that such a comically enormous image depicts a penis.

It’s a testament to our species and its long history of drawing these genitals wherever we go.

Cave art in Asia Minor dated to 8000 years ago shows a human figure with an enormous phallus. The phallic symbol of the lingam has been used to worship Shiva for at least 4000 years in India. Sexually provocative graffiti can be found all throughout ancient Roman baths. And what modern day high school desk has not been, at some time or another, adorned with the outline of male genitals?

There is something in us that revels in the image of a penis. Confident, silly, bold, playful, sexual, ridiculous, shocking, hilarious. How appropriate that it should be the largest image our species has ever made.