If I said to you, "What does the Internet look like?" a bunch of different ideas would probably come to mind. You might think of funny cat GIFs or tweets or ridiculous celebrity Instagram photos or salacious news headlines or something else entirely.
As you can see, the Internet can mean a lot of different things to different people. So you might think visualizing it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. But that's where you're wrong. You can actually do this if you just enlist some help.
Back in 2013, London-based designer Benjamin Redford launched a Kickstarter campaign for "Internetopia," a project to create a massive 24 by 36-inch visual representation of the Internet using suggestions from supporters. Backers could purchase a cube of the poster for $1 and then suggest what Redford should draw in that spot.
Redford's project was successfully funded and then some, earning more than $11,000 (his goal was $2,000). In June 2014, Redford completed a black-and-white version of the poster that took three months to finish and included the suggestions of 220 Kickstarter users from around the world. Now he just released the color version of what is thought to be "the largest crowdsourced drawing in existence" in all its psychedelic glory.
The finished product definitely looks like something out of Where's Waldo?. There's so much happening in this poster, I don't even know where to start. There's a tank, an orange tree, a giant cat, a naked man, Jake from Adventure Time and lots of faces of the people who supported the project. And yes, as you can imagine, you will be able to find Waldo in this illustration. Several, actually. You could spend hours looking and looking at this poster and still stumble upon new illustrations you never saw before, kind of like the Internet itself.
Redford told The Huffington Post in June that he wanted to take his fascination with cyberspace and transform it from its usual "infinite, clean, grid systems" portrayal and make "a more 'human version,' made up by people around the world." However, the finished product turned out to be "something completely different."
Limited editions of both the color and black-and-white versions of the poster are available now on Internetopia's website. Let the trippy times begin!
