Michael Mandiberg
  |  
From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!

06.18.2015 - 07.11.2015

PRESS RELEASE

PRESS

Print Wikipedia by Michael Mandiberg
Produced by Lulu.com
2015

Denny Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!, featuring work from the Print Wikipedia series by Michael Mandiberg from June 18 to July 11, 2015.

Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date. The work is also a reflection on the actual transparency or completeness of knowledge containers and history.

The exhibition at Denny Gallery will be the performance of the upload of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com (a print-on-demand website), and exhibition of a selection of volumes from the project. The upload process will take between eleven and fourteen days, during which time, the upload process will be on continuous view. In addition, the gallery will remain open around the clock through the first weekend of the exhibition, in recognition that the computer itself works continuously. There will be two channels for watching this process: a projection of the Lulu.com site in a web browser and a computer monitor with the command line updates showing the dialogue between the code and the site. The script will also post to Twitter after it finishes each volume. Individual volumes and the entirety of Print Wikipedia, Wikipedia Table of Contents, and Wikipedia Contributor Appendix will be available for sale. The build and upload process will take place in real time; until this process begins, exact metrics for the scale of the work can only be estimated.

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. He received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and his B.A. from Brown University. His work traces the lines of political and symbolic power online, working on the Internet in order to comment on and intercede in the real flows of information. He sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, and created Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com. He is co-author of Digital Foundations and Collaborative Futures and the editor of The Social Media Reader. A recipient of residencies and commissions from Eyebeam, Rhizome.org, and Turbulence.org, his work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Ars Electronica, ZKM, and Transmediale. A former Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, he is currently Director of the New York Arts Practicum, a co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work has previously been exhibited at Denny Gallery in the exhibition Share This! Appropriation After Cynicism. He has also exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, The New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Jen Beckman Gallery, Parsons’ Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center. His work has been written about in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Berliner Zeitung, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, MOMUS, Flash Art and Artforum.

Denny Gallery and Michael Mandiberg would like to thank the Wikimedia Foundation, Lulu.com, The Banff Centre and Eyebeam for their support of the exhibition.

Please join us for an opening reception for the artist, Michael Mandiberg, on Thursday, June 18, from 6 to 8 p.m. Denny Gallery is located at 261 Broome Street in New York City. The gallery will have special hours during this exhibition, which will be posted on www.dennygallery.com.

 

Events

06.18.15 Opening Reception | 6-8 pm |

Please join us for an opening reception for the artist, Michael Mandiberg, on Thursday, June 18.

06.18.15 GALLERY OPEN 24 HOURS/DAY | 6 pm |

The gallery will be open continuously (24 hours/day) for the first weekend of the exhibition (June 18 at 6 p.m. – June 21 at 6 p.m.)

October 08, 2015 Press

Michael Mandiberg’s Print Wikipedia reviewed in Artforum

For Michael Mandiberg’s “From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!” at Denny Gallery, the artist displayed a limited run of his Print Wikipedia project, 2015, which makes the online encyclopedia available in proprietary print-on-demand form.

Read on Artforum.

July 13, 2015 Press

Michael Mandiberg’s Print Wikipedia in The New York Times

Print Wikipedia, an effort to envision all of English-language Wikipedia as an old-fashioned dead-tree reference set, reached its conclusion just before 10 p.m. on Sunday when a handful of people gathered at a Lower East Side art gallery to watch the last of 7,600 volumes upload to the print-on-demand Web site Lulu.com — exactly 24 days, 3 hours and 18 minutes after the process began.


June 16, 2015 Events

Michael Mandiberg’s Print Wikipedia featured in the New York Times

Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves


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