Detail shot from Benjamin Redford’s Internetopia (2014)
Photo: Courtesy the artist.

According to the Huffington Post, artist Benjamin Redford has completed a portrait of the Internet. And, luckily for the Internet, it’s a lot better than the one that was recently done of Kate Middleton. The artist created his rendering of the vast online world, titled Internetopia, using content crowd-sourced from 220 people, using Kickstarter.

The contributors submitted their ideas in exchange for a donation, with the promise that the more they donated, the larger their contribution would appear in the final artwork. Redford exceeded his Kickstarter goal by $9,000, initially asking for $2,000 and receiving a comparatively enormous $11,000. The piece was drawn by hand with pencil on an eight-by-five-foot canvas, which the artist divided into 3,012 small cubes. Now, after three months of his meticulous penciling, we finally have our map of the information superhighway.

Detail shot from Benjamin Redford’s Internetopia (2014)
Photo: Courtesy the artist.

So what were some of the requests? According to Redford, they ranged from “a cat eating a hot dog sitting in an upright position, sitting on a stack of cats attached together by a belt with balloons on strings floating in the sky” (which took up 20 cubes) to “a hot sand-desert with a man lying somewhere not in center, legs and hands spread. Happy or dead, it’s unknown. A horse nearby, standing with a head lowered, tired of a long walk” (that required 15 cubes) to “an old beluga whale, teaching a classroom of baby sharks and baby beluga whales. Some of the sharks are morphing into whales” (this took 10 cubes) to “a trumpet” (1 cube).” We couldn’t have summed the Internet up better ourselves.

Interestingly, a different Benjamin Redford created a different, though equally cool, art project through Kickstarter: the mini Instagram projector.