Sixteen Years, 1,683 Covers, Zero Reruns
From June 2010 until the final show in October 2026, the No Agenda Art Generator ran as one of the largest sustained collaborative art efforts of the digital era. 1,678 artists submitted 38,767 original pieces of album art, and the hosts picked a cover for 1,683 episodes from the community's submissions. That's 1,683 different covers and zero reruns, chosen twice a week, Thursday and Sunday, for sixteen years.
This was never a one-off event or a single shared canvas. It is a record of discrete, on-topic, original works, made under competitive selection against the clock of a live show, and tied directly to the media production it served. 244 different artists saw their work chosen as an episode cover. Everything else submitted, including the pieces that went on to live as Podcasting 2.0 chapter art, is still here in full. It's an unbroken record of a community of producers deconstructing the news, one square at a time, for the Best Podcast in the Universe.
How It Stacks Up
- Reddit's r/Place had millions of users placing single pixels on a shared canvas over a few days, roughly 16 million tiles in 2017 and tens of millions in later runs. The images were remarkable, and temporary. None of it adds up to thousands of standalone original artworks kept up for years.
- The AIDS Memorial Quilt is often called the largest community arts project in history: nearly 50,000 hand-sewn memorial panels made by thousands of people over decades. It is a profound and growing memorial. The Art Generator is something different: a competitive production of original covers for a show that went out twice a week.
- Christo installations, giant murals, and one-day or festival events involve impressive numbers of people or square footage. Few combine the longevity, the volume of discrete original works, the twice-weekly deadline, and direct use in a show that went out without interruption for sixteen years of it.
Larger single events and memorials exist. But for the sheer number of original artworks, the length of continuous production, and a competition that kept every episode visually unique, the Art Generator ranks near the top. Not bad for something that started as a weekend project in the trollroom.
A Weekend in the Trollroom (2010)
In June of 2010 there was no formal way to submit album art to the No Agenda show. I was learning the then "new to me" Drupal 6 content management system at the same time, so I killed two birds with one stone: build a simple tool that let anyone submit artwork live while we trolled along in the IRC trollroom during the show's recording, add a little community and competition, and learn Drupal module development along the way.
The first version was built over a weekend. As part of it I did my best to bring in the work of Sir Randy Asher and Sir Paul T., who had produced the bulk of the user-submitted art up to that point, which is why the archive's covers reach back to episode 120 in August 2009. Credits for the art that came without one live on under The Tomb of the Missing Artist.
That first version carried the show for almost four years and roughly 4,500 submissions, with an abandoned attempt at Drupal 7 somewhere along the way, as the Drupal community was busier writing codes of conduct than writing code.
The Laravel Years (2014–2022)
Around then, much of the PHP community and I noticed a promising new framework called Laravel, and the generator became my way of learning it. In October 2014 the Art Generator was rewritten from the ground up on Laravel 4, which made it far easier to maintain and customize.
By 2022 that codebase was showing its age. Support for the old versions of PHP and the database was being deprecated, and the upgrade path from Laravel 4 to 5 more or less says "rewrite your application." Laravel itself had matured into the most popular PHP framework on the Internet, and upgrades between versions now took minutes or hours. I procrastinated anyway: I was already writing Laravel all day, and I spent my spare time learning the other tools that would make the eventual rewrite worthwhile.
The Host That Vanished (2023)
I started the rewrite in early 2023, a weekend at a time, and got serious about it in early summer. The new version ran on Laravel 10, Livewire and Docker, with a new design built around a logo graciously provided by Nykko Syme, plus the community's long-standing requests: dark and light modes, easier download links, and a codebase that wouldn't fight back.
Then, toward the end of September, the host that had powered the Art Generator since 2010 told its customers it was shutting down. I moved the database off right away and as much of the site as I could, while racing to finish the new build. They promised hosting through the end of my prepaid term in May 2024. On the morning of November 30, 2023 they disappeared without a trace: phones unanswered, emails bouncing. Nothing lights a fire under your rear quite like that.
The new generator launched on Sunday, December 17th, 2023. It was a rocky start with "good-enough" functionality, and the caching and hardware took a few days to settle. What it delivered made it worth it:
- Every piece optimized and scaled to the smallest file size at the resolutions Apple requires (3,000 x 3,000 px) and the size sane people use (512 x 512 px), without the clutter of temporary files and thumbnails from the old system.
- Artwork organized by year and month, with the artist's name and the title in the filename, so offline copies make sense.
- An archive nearly half the size, down from 30 GB+ to about 15 GB, even with the larger downloads.
- Much more credit for artists, with easier ways to find all of their work and grab high-quality copies of it.
The Final Stretch (2026)
Nobody knew it would be the last year, but 2026 was a busy one under the hood. The site moved up through Laravel 11 to Laravel 12, all artwork moved to a dedicated CDN, slow database queries were fixed and caching added throughout, and security was tightened. For the artists, there was a much friendlier upload and cropping tool (no more getting blocked for not being perfectly square), duplicate detection per episode, social links on artist profiles, a refreshed profile page, and a way to view, edit or delete your art while it waited for approval.
The Final Episode and the Archive (October 2026)
No Agenda signed off with episode 1,916, "The Final Episode", on October 30, 2026, wearing Brad Connell's "Closing Tag" as its cover. Submissions closed with the show.
With nothing left to submit, the Art Generator has become a permanent archive. It's now a plain, static website served from Cloudflare: no logins, no database, and nothing for anyone to hack. Every submission is still here and every credit is preserved: browse it by artwork, artist, episode or the leaderboards, or download the whole thing with the lists in the sidebar.
Thank you to Adam and John for nineteen years of the best podcast in the universe, and to every artist, in every time zone, who stayed up late, got up early or slipped away from work to get a piece in before the show ended. You made something nobody else has.
Value for value, in pixels. In the morning!
--
"Sir" Paul Couture
Keeper of the Artwork