Michael Mandiberg, an artist and teacher at the Graduate Center of the City of New York and the College of Staten Island, is embarking on the ambitious task of printing out all of Wikipedia, which is set to exist in 7,600 volumes.
For the upcoming exhibition “From Aaaaa! To ZZZap!,” at Denny Gallery, Mandiberg will publicly upload all 11 gigabytes of Wikipedia to Lulu.com, the printing website. The upload, estimated to take 11 to 14 days, will be projected onto the gallery walls in the meantime.
Previous efforts have been made to estimate the size of Wikipedia, but Mandiberg's has been the most thorough. Since he began harvesting data on April 7, and estimated 7.5 million edits have been made, according to the Wikimedia Foundation.
He says the project is a mix of "half utilitarian data visualization project, half absurdist poetic gesture."
Once the printing of each volume is completed, the title will be posted to Twitter at @PrintWikipedia. The entire collection will be available for sale for $500,000.