Bean Brew No.10 Airlines
TLDR
This map envisions a complicated airplane route map based upon three simple questions. Where are you from? Where are going? Where did you drink your beer?
Juicy details
Participants in this Bean Brew experience were asked three simple (yet confusing!) questions, loosely related to their past, their present, and their future. I used their answers to create a fictitious airline map with routes connecting the three answers provided by each person. In some instances these routes were quite logical (New Jersey ---> San Francisco ---> Hawaii). Other routes were deliciously improbable (Indiana ---> Nashville ---> Oklahoma ---> Oakland ---> San Francisco ---> Thousand Oaks ---> Archipelago of Impossibility). One of my favorite details is the seating map, with people seated in proximity to where they were born in relationship to New Jersey.
This map is the 10th in the Bean Brew mapping experience.
Format
- Format
- Silk Screen
- Size
- 24" by 18"
Prints available
Silk Screen · 24" by 18"
Zoomed details
The Bean Brew story
Bean Brew came about as a home brewing project transformed into a mapping project. It worked like this:
- I would brew a batch of beer (generally a Saison) into about 16 large format bottles.
- Every batch had a theme, which was almost always ridiculous, but just plausible enough to maybe be true? Accompanying this theme was a survey, which at first actually asked people about their Bean Brew beer drinking experience. However, these questions quickly went rogue.
- The 16 bottles of beer were given away at first. In later years they were actually sold in highly exclusive batches. The beer was drunk. Usually without too much hounding, every person who obtained a bottle returned their survey results to Bean Brew HQ.
- I analyzed these results with the help of my slide rule, then designed a map visualizing the Bean Brew experience.
- The Bean Brew designs were then dispatched to Texas, where my friend Rand used his mad crazy printmaking skills to transform them into four-color silkscreens. Rand was always very busy (or falling off of ladders) and the silkscreening process generally took many months to complete.
- On a happy day many months after the original beers were consumed, every person who participated in the experience received a beautiful map.