Ask the internet a question, and you’re bound to get some weird answers. So last fall when Ben Redford, a designer and artist living in London, asked the internet to tell him what to draw, it was no surprise that he received some...interesting requests.

Redford had the questionable idea to to create a internet-sourced illustration. He called it Internetopia. “I figured if I asked a bunch of people what the internet looked like, surely they’d come up with a bunch of weird stuff,” he says. Except Redford didn’t ask people what they internet looked like; instead, he asked them a open-ended question: What should I draw? “It was literally like, anything goes,” he says.

>Out of 220 requests, there were only two for male genitalia.

People could pay $1 to claim a 1.5 x 1.5 inch cube of paper space and Redford would draw them anything they’d like. The more plots you paid for, the bigger your drawing would be. Requests came pouring in. “My boss had a wager with me that I’d be drawing porn for the next three months,” says Redford. “I was surprised that it didn’t turn out to be more explicit.” And indeed, Redford’s illustration is more absurd than pornographic (out of 220 requests, there were only two for male genitalia and one for “a naked man”).

being ridden by the cookie monster holding a cookie that says 'henge.'" Because why not? Image: Ben Redford

The final drawing is basically the visual representation of the internet’s consciousness. Someone paid $20 for 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.” Another paid $1 for an “owl drinking a raspberry soda.” The biggest buy-in was a $125 representation of 5 Pointz in New York, a famous outdoor graffiti gallery, with all relevant graffiti tags and artists.

Redford published the entire list of requests and the requester’s names. He figures making people accountable for their ideas is the only reason shit didn’t get even weirder. “If I didn’t do that, I think it would’ve been a lot more sinister,” he says.

By the end of the Kickstarter, people had bought more than 3,000 cubes, and Redford started drawing each request onto the page, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He began by sketching a cosmonaut in the lower lefthand corner and worked his way up to the upper right corner with a map of Australia. “Then there’s a bunch of freaky weird stuff in the middle,” he says. He used pencil to sketch onto graph paper, then went over it with pen on tracing paper. The original artwork measured 2.5x1 meters and took him more than 3 months to finish. The final product was scanned and shrunk down to fit on an A1 sheet of paper (24x36 inches).

The drawing is artistically impressive, but more interesting than that is being able to comb through the jumble of sketches to find what makes people tick. You could say it’s just a poster, sure, but it’s also a fantastic insight to the strangeness of the human mind. Of note: Redford guesses that around 70 percent of requests involved an animal in some form. “I think for my next project I’m going to open up a pet shop.”

Get a closer look. Redford has 100 limited edition prints for sale on his website.