Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Collection and Research

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After the National Library, now on view at [Villa Stuck](https://tinyurl.com/bdza4yjn) to Sept. 15.


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Project's Homepage

Video of the Upload Process

Script, code and documentation on GitHub

Video The Story of Print Wikipedia

Mandiberg_Print Wikipedia_FAQ.pdf

FAQs Print Wikipedia 

Mandiberg_Print Wikipedia Fabrication & Install Guide MM.pdf

Fabrication & Install Guide

Mandiberg

“*Print Wikipedia* (2009–2016) is 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and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date.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” (project website).

Thus, the artist uses the transfer of the online encyclopedia into the familiar book format as a scale of measurement for the unimaginable amounts of data. Only this makes the dimensions of the collective writing experiment and the extent of the collected knowledge on Wikipedia comprehensible. In total, it takes 7,473 volumes. They include only the text of the Wikipedia articles, not the images and references. They are complimented by a ninety-one volume *Wikipedia Table of Contents* and a thirty-six volume *Wikipedia Contributor Appendix* which lists the names of the 7.5 million Wikipedia users who have made at least a single edit to the website. Each volume has its own ISBN. 

The artwork, categorized as “poetry” in Lulu’s webshop, was launched and first exhibited at Denny Gallery, New York, in 2015. The exhibition presented a live projected video which displayed the fully automatic generation and upload of the *Print Wikipedia* volumes to Lulu.com. This process lasted twenty-four days, three hours, and eighteen minutes. Each time a volume was completed and uploaded, an announcement was posted to Twitter (@PrintWikipedia). 

In addition to this video, the exhibition featured a selection of printed volumes in front of a customized wallpaper that represented floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of volumes illustrating how much space the entire Wikipedia would take. Mandiberg is convinced: “It is not necessary to print them all out, as our imaginations can complete what’s missing” (Michael Mandiberg, “Making *Print Wikipedia*”). Sophie Seita has described this strange but very typical state of limbo for print-on-demand, on the threshold of becoming printed in almost the same words as “imagined printedness” (Sophie Seita, “Thinking the Unprintable”).

The individual volumes and the entirety of *Print Wikipedia*, *Wikipedia Table of Contents*, and *Wikipedia Contributor Appendix* are available for sale on Lulu.com. We purchased the first volume of each of the three series for our collection. The script is made available on GitHub.com, including the README files explaining the multi-step process in more detail and noting bug fixes for future iterations. The code parses the entire Wikipedia database, creates print ready PDFs, and uploads them to Lulu.com. The install documents for future exhibitions, covering the upload process and the custom wallpaper’s production, are also available.

Wikimedia cooperated with the project and Lulu.com helped fund it. The reason the artist turned to Lulu in the first place was because uploading such volumes of data and books would surely have led to their account being suspended by the platform because it could be considered a spam or DoS attack.

Like Wikipedia itself, Mandiberg’s project is produced under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA. However, in order to be allowed to use the Wikipedia logo, Mandiberg was supposed to label each volume with the statement “This is a work of art” on the front cover. In the end it was agreed that on the back cover the following note was to be printed in small font, which also clarifies the question of authorship attribution: “CC BY-SA 3.0 2015, Wikipedia contributors; see Appendix for a complete list of contributors. […] This work is legally categorized as an artistic work. As such, this qualifies for trademark use under clause 3.6.3 (Artistic, scientific, literary, political, and other non-commercial uses) as denoted at wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/ Trademark_policy. […] This work is not endorsed by or affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.” 

open edition

isbn

cc by-sa

15.8 x 23.5 cm / 6" x 9"

exhibition copy

artist’s book / bookwork

nonfiction

black-and-white

hardcover

perfect bound

generative / automation

documentation / archiving

reformatting

Lulu

analog / digital

scale

platforms / companies

memory / storage

crowd / collaboration

wikipedia

print-on-demand

data

code / programming

authorship

Print Wikipedia

Henner

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*_IMG* is a series of two books to date that present “the digital binary data of historical photographs as literature,” as the blurb on the artist’s website claims. Each book is based on a pre-digital photograph that was digitized, compressed as a .jpg, and archived by an official source. Mishka Henner opened the image file with a text editor and used the resulting ASCII character sequence as content for his book. Even though the resulting text is a hybrid that is no longer machine-readable nor readable for humans without the help of interpreting tools, the books nonetheless show the amount of characters necessary to define the picture. They also work as analog containers for saving data that could be used to recreate the files for displaying the images. 

As both books also include a 5 x 7 inch silver gelatin print of the corresponding photograph, *_IMG* is also a reflection on originals and copies in photography and the historic punctum in analog and digital picturing. Furthermore, both photographs depict historical moments of passing and transition, mirroring in content the three steps of remediation present in the books: from analog image to digitally codified image to an analog version of the code. 

Although *_IMG* is produced in print-on-demand, it is also an experiment with scarcity: the first volume was produced in an edition of ninety-seven signed and numbered copies (this corresponds to the number of years since the photograph was taken), the second one in an edition of twenty-five copies, and a possible third one could be published in only three or four copies (Mishka Henner, interview with Apod.li). The fact that Henner has, amazingly, already sold more than sixty copies of this series (as of 2021) could be due to this artificial rarefaction.