So, on December the 7th, the culmination of four weeks intense work came together in an amazing event at Protein‘s gallery off Curtain rd in Shoreditch.

I had spent days trawling through all the till data from the coffee shop to work out quantities of caffeine, water, milk, coffee etc served over the first complete year of the buisness.

From there, I commissioned artists and illustrators to produce a limited edition print with the most concise of briefs. 1.33Kg of caffeine, 873liters of water, 64.6Kg of paper cups were some of the data-points that lead to surreal abstractions by our chosen contributors. Despite the macro level briefs, strong patterns emerged in the pallets used.

I also trawled through a years worth of coffee bags, saved by the shop, to build a database of origin, varietal, roaster and roast date to help lead an educational data-visualisation that would show the seasonality and other trends of specialty coffee. The amazing Signal-Noise stepped up and gave their time for free to the project, creating the brilliant video below. This actually runs as a programme on coffee.signal-noise.co.uk but for the sake of easy embedding I have included the video. Once again I gave the simplest of briefs, to encourage their own take on my idea and they came through with an intelligent, abstract map projection to bring clarity to the popularity of European roasters while still describing the equatorial growing regions beautifully.

The last point of the tryptic was a bespoke IOS game by app developers Johnny Two Shoes. They took the engine for their much hyped upcoming game prevail, and re-imagined a world of espresso ships delivering coffee beans for you to feed to messrs Dunne and Frankowski (who were transmorphicated (is that a word?) into a horse and ostrich respectively . Positioned in a swivel mount that I built, the game will be available to play in the shop for the foreseeable future. There are even plans to include aspects of the game in the final release of Prevail next year, but it’s all a bit hush hush for now.

The turn out for the event was a huge success, filling out the space to bursting. I’d like to thank a few people that donated time, product and cold hard cash to enable us to put this one:

Auchentoshan for providing their Three Wood scotch

Point101 for the beautiful giclee prints and ongowing fulfilment service

Rebel Dining Society for helping us buy some brilliant wine for Sager and Wilde  to pour.

Moo for printing out our invitation postcards

The show should return to the 18 Hewett street space (EC2A 3NN) until some time in January and there is talk of the show touring the world, starting at Drop Coffee in February.

Should you not be able to visit the show, all prints are for sale and available at the DunneFrankowski store for £50 + p&p.

Thanks to Viv at Protein for the pictures.