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[Exclusive] Meet the Man Printing Wikipedia as a Book

Michael Mandiberg's physical visualization of human knowledge has ten, 700-page volumes of "cat" entries.
Courtesy Michael Mandiberg and Denny Gallery, NYC

It’s Wikipedia and it’s physically under one roof thanks to Michael Mandiberg, publishing site Lulu.com, and Denny Gallery New York. Michael Mandiberg co-author of Digital Foundations, Collaborative Futures and editor of The Social Media Reader, has just dropped his most ambitious project yet, Print Wikipedia. The project transforms the world’s largest collection of knowledge into book form by writing software that parses the Wikipedia database in English and lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand.

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"This project has two correlated sectors, one of which has utility, and one that does not," Mandiberg tells The Creators Project. Not only does printing out a portion of the largest accumulation of human knowlege in history help us visualize how truly vast it is, but the artist values the format's ability to put otherwise unrelated words together in irrational ways. "Seeing the words that show up on these covers, like 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' to 'Humanitarianism in Africa' and that's the volume on humanism. And there's two examples of the failure of humanism. So there's a lot of value in it poetically." The book consists of 7,471 volumes of entries amounting to 5,244,111 pages of text, plus a 36-volume index of the almost 7.5 million named contributors.

The fascination in making Wikipedia into tangible reference guides is not new. In 2014, a similar project to Print Wikipedia titled Pediapress crowdfunded to print the online database to fit into approximately 1,000 books, with 1,200 pages each. Each project values the importance of the qauntity of online information but their approaches do differ. Mandiberg's attempt is conceptual and revolves around the rhythm of technology.

A gallery performance composed of the uploading process of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com will take place over 11 to 14 days. The gallery will remain open for all to see in recognition that the computer itself works continuously.

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Courtesy Michael Mandiberg and Denny Gallery, NYC

Courtesy Michael Mandiberg and Denny Gallery, NYC

The Print Wikipediaexhibition will take place in Denny Gallery, New York from June 18th –July 2nd.
See more of Michael Mandiberg's work on his website.

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