Good evening, everybody. Welcome and thank you for coming. My name is Jim
O'donnell. I'm the university librarian In that capacity and in other
capacities. I know a thing or two about encyclopedias. The word has been
around for over 2000 years and it always captures a spirit of trying to
include somehow or another everything we can know in the confines of a
curriculum set of books, an intellectual architecture of some kind. So
tonight we're here to think about encyclopedias and other things and we
have our exhibits set up if you haven't noticed that facing a lot of other
traditional print encyclopedias. But this one that we're playing with,
thinking with thinking about tonight is about two orders of magnitude
larger than anything on the other side of the aisle, two orders of
magnitude is a lot. It's a whole lot bigger. The world is changed and
different for this kind of thing, if it's a thing to be possible. So thank
you for coming. We've invited three people to introduce us to the exhibit
and their reflections on the exhibit. I'll introduce each in sequence um,
while also recognizing a another important friend who's with us tonight.
Michael Mando Berg will speak to us first. He is the artist. I haven't
consulted with him, but I'm going to call him an internet artist because
almost everything he does gets tangled up in the internet in some form or
another. I'm not sure I've ever thought about calling a firefox plug in a
work of art, but I'm not quite sure what else to call the things he does
that are Firefox plug ins. He's been working for the last 15, 20 years in
developing a profile. He teaches at the College of Staten Island. He's
based in New York, but he's also had exhibits in various places in Europe.
This exhibit comes to us because it previewed on the road before coming
to the big city of Tempe Arizona in Lower Manhattan um at the Elizabeth
Denny Gallery. And it's a pleasure to welcome Elizabeth Denny, who's here
in the front row. Who was the impresario? Who with Michael made this
happen. Got our attention. Uh it got a fair amount of ink in some ways
last summer, but it was there in provincial Lower Manhattan and we thought
it was time to bring it to the bright lights and big city of Tempe. And
we're grateful uh to Elizabeth and Michael for helping us make this
possible. So I will shut up and say no more. We have two of our faculty
colleagues to respond and reflect on this after we hear from Michael. But
Michael, welcome to Tempe and welcome to the microphone.
Okay, yes,
no, that's not going to stay there.
Thank you. That was a really great introduction and it's really awesome to
be here. Um and I'm actually going to start out with some things. Um I
want to thank jim for having the idea of bringing the project here and
bringing me here. Uh he wrote me out of the blue via an introduction from
another, you might say, internet artist, um And said, Let's make this
happen, this is amazing. I'm trying to think about what libraries are in
the 21st century. Uh and this seems like the kind of um work that would do
just that and allow us to have a conversation. Um and I want to thank
Elizabeth Denny for helping make this all happen um and really
facilitating the arrival of this project here. Um
having arrived here, it would not have been possible without jenny
Duvernay, who's been producing this project ah with me over the last week
, I arrived on Wednesday. Um and I've been keeping her here late um and
she's been having to arrive early and make trips and go find things
because she has turned into a producer um and also a little bit of a
prepared or um along the same lines, I want to thank Gordon Knox for um
you know, helping co present this with the art museum um because this
project actually can't entirely be understood without the context of
the Humanities and the Arts. Um
and that's one of the reasons why I was so excited about doing this year.
Um when I show this, I teach at the Graduate Center and the College of
Staten Island, I teach in the Digital Humanities. I'm an artist uh
teaching amongst a bunch of phds. Um and uh They kind of get it from one
angle, they get the like technology, the the the sort of intellectual
capacity of it. Um but they're missing out on some of the art historical
contexts. On the other hand, you know, when I show it in the art context,
they don't know, say the history of the encyclopedia, they don't
understand these sorts of factors as well. Um having arrived at this
possibility of doing it in two places, it would not have been possible. Um
without Gregory Sale who has last night I called him the fixer. Um he's
known exactly when to help and what exactly the right ways and I'm really
, really grateful. Um a stray, a Peyton and Rosita turova helped
facilitate a lot of things as well. Craig Barton and Zachary's ship from
the design school allowed me to print this on their printers. Adrian
Yannick, um Gracia Coleman have all come together and helped um when it
actually came time to putting it up, I worked with six wonderful students
, Kelsey, hi Ainsley,
Angel Lopez, Dressler Parsons, kayla, meyer brian eccles and rob fuller.
Those are just the people that helped here.
I've been working on this project for six years. I've worked with probably
dozens of people to help make this happen, most notably Jonathan Catherine
who's been working with me on the code for two years, anna Hachani who's
been working as my studio manager, Patrick Davison who worked with me in
2009 when I started this project
helping with some of the programming, as well as the design.
I did a residency at Banff For a month working with three people there. I
started this project at IBM in 2000 and nine during my fellowship in
Senior Fellowship.
And this was supported by Cooney
and I think it's important to thank people, but I didn't go through that
laundry list just
to thank people. It's also a way of showing the way in which projects like
this require collaboration.
Um
in a sense, I'm collaborating with 7.5 million people as well.
I'm going to come back to that but I want to tell a little bit about what
I did and how I did it. Um as you've probably gathered, I turned Wikipedia
into books. Now I did that by taking the database and uh I wrote code that
transformed it into PDFs along with covers, and then a separate piece of
code that uploaded those to lulu dot com, where they're available, prefer
print on demand. Um
The show at Denny Gallery, we actually did the upload as a performance, a
kind of data performance. It lasted 24 days, three hours and 18 minutes.
Um that structured the exhibition um when the exhibition ended the final
tweet from the software cause it tweeted out every time there was an
upload it tweeted out the title and the volume number and then a link. The
final tweet went up um at the show. There were the same same wallpaper,
some of the same books. Um and
the
mm hmm. One of the other things that's there is the contributors appendix
which is downstairs on the first floor. The contributors appendix came
about because of this question of collaboration. So one of the questions I
get is, well, how did you get permission to do that? Um and I usually
actually don't ask for permission when I do things like this, but I
actually didn't have to this time because it's all available under a
creative commons license. Wikipedia is available under a creative commons
attribute attribution share alike license for those of you that don't know
what a creative commons licenses it's somebody exercising their copyright
to enable other people to use it. You have all rights reserved. And that
includes saying, I don't want to reserve all my rights. So in this case
the rights are reserved as long as you give attribution and also preserve
the creative commons attribution share like license.
So how do you give attribution
to Wikipedia? I went to the foundation, I asked them, I said, shit, how do
I do this? And they said, ah that's a good question. We can't give you
legal advice. You should you should not be it should not be the wikimedia
foundation. We can tell you that uh we will point you to these pages that
might give you some information. Uh the pages were about how to cite an
individual article which said that you should cite the five most prompt,
you should cite the five leading authors. They didn't say whether it was
the bite count. They didn't say whether it was the Whether it was the
number of edits. They didn't say whether it was the person edited 1st.
There was a lot of uncertainty besides which at the very end of the
process, having to go back and rewrite all the code in order to account
for that was computational and frankly impossible to think about doing. Um
I went to creative commons, they said that's a really good question. We
can't give you legal advice. And I said, you know what? I'm just going to
make a list of all of them. And then I went back to the foundation, I said
, where does this list live? And they said, that's a good question. We
don't know. But you can look at this code, it might help you. It's meant
for generating lists of user names. I looked at the code, I modified it a
little bit. I ran it, it crashed, it crashed because no one had ever tried
to do this before. It wasn't buffered, it just tried to store all this
information and then when the whole process was done right it to a file Um
it ran out of memory, I think I had 16GB of RAM on the computer.
There's a lot of people that have made this possible. This points to these
ideas of information um in in this context, in the 21st century. Um some
numbers that are probably pretty useful. The appendix, like I said 7.5
million contributors. Um There's 11.5 million entries that do include
redirects. Um if there are any Wikipedia is in the house, they get very
they want to know that information.
There's five million pages. I made a 91 volume table of Contents. All this
points to uh
data. We live in a world of data. Uh you've probably heard the term big
data. You might know what that means. You might not we hear it so much
that's thrown around the way I try to understand big data. And this is not
my definition and I honestly don't remember exactly whose it is, but it's
information that cannot be processed at a human scale. It requires a level
of abstraction between you and the data for it to be legible. We don't
know how much data is being stored in the NSA's facility. We don't know
how much data is being stored in facebook's facility. Um
We might know the square footage but that doesn't really tell us anything.
We might know the number of petabytes, but that doesn't tell us anything.
It's abstract. It's not legible at a human scale.
One of the reasons why I wanted to do this was to figure out how big it
was because I had no idea I had been contributing to Wikipedia for a year.
So at that point I'm not a heavy contributor at that time. Um and I
wanted to figure out how big it was. And one of the things I learned along
the way is that a book at this point in time? Probably not in 100 years. A
book is a really useful unit of measurement.
You don't, I I started thinking about do I need to make them? Do I need to
print them all out? We'll print them all out. Would cost probably about
$300,400,000.
I decided I didn't need to, but I did need to print some, our brains can
finish the rest. So that's one of the other questions. Why didn't you
print it all out? You know why you have to print it at all? Um one of the
other things I learned is that when you alphabet alphabetize a database,
you learn things we live in a world where things are stored in databases.
Many of these, you know this this um library is is not stored in a
database. It's all in order. It's not out of order. You can't pull things
up randomly. We have databases that will help us get into the ordered
information. This is all linear Wikipedia is all linear. So we learn
things we put that together. Um
one of the volumes over there. There's 20 eight volumes for back. So I
chose the entries here based off the words on the spine. Art fat cat cats
because cats win the internet ear and end. Um, there are some others that
we chose God sex. Those are pretty obvious. Um, but why bat? Um,
Those are 28 volumes primarily consists of descriptions of battles.
So we end up seeing a kind of structural history of humanity. Similarly
new is 26 volumes, which ends up being The Story of Colonialism in the
19th Century.
So this is a kind of data visualization. Um, people who do proper data
visualization would look at this and say that's not a data visualization.
Where's the graphs? But it is a kind of visualization. I've abstracted
the information in in order to make it legible at the same time. Um, It's
a work of art it points to and an ax a history and trajectory of
conceptual art, appropriation. Um, and those kinds of works. Um it engages
poetry and poetics, I think of it as one giant found palm at the same time.
And the works on the spines are these kind of chance poems. Um
and
one of the other things that's important and this engages both with a kind
of poetics as well as as a history of art is is that it's always already
out of date. That's one of the other questions are you going to update it
? Are you going to update it? I don't need to update it because it's
always already out of date when I started this, I was working with the
April seven database dump. Um and I immediately started unpacking it. It
takes about four days to download, you know, takes another six days to
unpack into the database, then I run some sequel queries against it, which
takes another two days and then I start running the code and that takes
another three weeks. Um so no matter how I cut it, by the time I get to
PDFs were already out of date um and that's kind of a metaphor, right?
That's a metaphor with life with technology. Um So this is my sort of
framing and and um for the context and I'm really excited to hear what
MEREDITH and I'd have to say
Mhm.
I was going to try to pretend that our other speakers are just mild
mannered professors from the department of English and the department of
Art history, but if I tried to say that I wouldn't be able to say anything
else about them without revealing that it's a little more complicated than
that MEREDITH Heuer will be our first speaker. She comes from the School
of Design, she has a PhD from Berkeley, she works in contemporary, we
could say art history and art theory, but in a very s you kind of way,
she's always looking for the boundaries, she's looking for the ways to
include what traditionally might not have been included. Um for her And I
think this is probably the best way to introduce her for her. Somebody
like Michael is perfectly normal and familiar and conventional or almost
so MEREDITH. Thank you for joining us.
Mhm. Thank you very much girl in trouble. I am going to push the
boundaries by not using the podium. Um Not because I'm not much of a rebel
really. Um but because my arms aren't long enough to push the button on my
computer and um because I am somewhat of an art historian. Oh, the mic
because I am somewhat of an art historian, I did bring images. Um so
unfortunately they will not be very easy to see. Um but they aren't very
good quality either. So as long as you see colors on the screen, you'll be
in really good shape. Um So here we go. Um and I'm also sitting next to
the artist. This is a little bit dangerous. Uh feel free to correct me if
I get anything grossly wrong. So many of Michael Mando Berg's other
projects such as After Sherry Levine,
which focused sharply on issues of appropriation, copyright, intellectual
property, patronage, and originality. Print Wikipedia re addresses these
issues in a new way by giving pride of place to the phenomenon of
information, production, dissemination organization and general overload.
In an age of big data when finds that attempting to capture a center of
meaning In print. Wikipedia initiates a cat and mouse game Manda Berg's
sprawling project presents a counterfactual ideal, in which all of
Wikipedia will be printed bound into volumes and arranged in proper
archival fashion, in from ah to zap. The First Installation of the Project
at the Denning Gallery in New York City held between June 18 and July 11
in 2015. Gallery walls were covered with wallpaper imaging the spines of
the 1st 1980 volumes of the entire set.
Much of the project involves a notional conversion to printing. It
manifests partially as a projection on one gallery wall of the process of
uploading the Wikipedia files to lulu dot com. A print on demand website.
The total upload would consist of 7,473
volumes of 700 pages each. The upload process lasted 24 days, 18 hours and
three minutes For the opening. The gallery was slated to allow entry to
visitors continuously for 48 hours, but as a reviewer, jennifer lung
reported in art forum on the second day of the opening. The process was
beset by technological glitches so often the vein or possibly the backbone
of media art practice in which instabilities in the upload script cause
periodic crashes, an event which seems inescapable in the performance of
such projects and indeed speaks to the specter of the instability within
the seemingly monolithic Wikipedia.
It is important to note that Vandenberg had no intention of carrying the
printing process through to completion. Only 166 volumes were physically
printed for the installation. In any case, the very notion of a complete
set of volumes is wittingly riddled with a sense of futility. And so far
as Wikipedia itself undergoes a constant process of change. Thus leading
to remark that there is a distinctly absurdist element to mandy birds
project, which is not out of line, which much of the serious humor of his
artistic practice.
One comment about the absurdism of Manda Burke's project was noted in the
new york Times article regarding his attempt to bind notionally into book
form, a system of knowledge production. That, according to Catherine Mayer
, chief communications officer at Wikipedia has transcended our ability to
hold it on volumes on a bookshelf. Between april 7th 2015, when Man Derek
harvested the data for print Wikipedia And the publication of the New York
Times article said it above. On June 17, 2015, An estimated 7.5 million
edits were made
while transforming the ever changing landscape of Wikipedia pages, which
undergo continuous editing from multiple users into bound volumes would
seem to artificially stabilize immutable system. Mandy berg takes into
account the irony embedded in the process of converting an electronic
database into a series of ostensibly inert objects, although those
invested in the social technological and political history of books. No,
they are far from inert in this sense, it is clear that print Wikipedia
takes into account the historicity of individual pages while concomitantly
gesturing to the history of the book and the necessity to preserve it as a
living form for Amanda Berg. Not only is this project an act of
appropriation on a grand skill, but it is also a poetic gesture that draws
attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia's content, a subject which
I shall return presently and the impossibility of rendering with Wikipedia
as a material object in fixed form once the volume is printed, as he just
stated is that it is already out of date. It is already out of date
because the included information is likely to have been edited. Whether
drastically or to the slightest degree, the radical shifts in Wikipedia
entries have become the subject of information visualization projects that
have data mined feuds within the Wikipedia community of authors marking
swaths of textual overwriting or dramatic erasers, in which entire
sections or pages disappear. See for example,
The 2003 project by Martin Wattenberg that visualizes changes made to
Wikipedia pages over time in a visual metaphor of geological sedimentation
,
Wattenberg alongside collaborators, fernanda Viegas and Jonathan Feinberg
is known for creating highly aesthetic sized visualizations, bridging the
gap between artwork and industry based information visualization of given
data sets from musical structure to stock market activity to in this
instance, activity on Wikipedia pages.
The website for the project proudly announces the resultant images as
pictures rather than diagrams of edit histories and four grounds. Dramatic
zig zagging patterns and abrupt gaps that appear to be glitches rather
than recordings of significant patterns in the data in the color schemes.
So this is where, sorry, this is where hopefully you can actually see. So
on the top here you actually have these bands of black where people have
completely erased the page and started all over. So the top one is the
page for abortion and the bottom one is the page for history.
In addition to projects attending to the history historicity of Wikipedia
pages, artworks and visualizations dealing in sheer numerical or
quantitative impossibility are not new to the art scene. Despite the claim
that Man Durer's print with Wikipedia represents the most concrete metric
of the database taken thus far. As a point of comparison, John F. Simon in
1997
created every icon, a program that utilizes a computational system to
challenge the imaginative threshold at which humans can grasp the concept
of a continuously unfolding temporal expanse.
Launched at 9:42 AM on January 27, 1997, every Icon is an online
computational flash conceptual artwork That artist John F. Simon claims he
envisioned in response to the 1980s postmodernist in donations about the
death of art. In the end of images. In this work, every possible
combination of black and white squares run sequentially within the
parameters of a 32 x 32 grid In closing 1024 squares In 1997 with Pentium
processor speeds capable of generating 100 combinations for a second.
Simon estimated that all possible combinations in the top line, about 4.3
billion variations could be completed in 16 months. But given the
exponential expansion of these combinatorial combinatorial possibilities,
it would take about six billion years to complete the second line for the
grid to reach its final state in which every square turns to black. It
would take several 100 trillion years. An ungraceful number that Simon
asks us to consider as a human perceptual limit. Yeah. In 1997 he offered
the New York Times. The following explanation quote. Because there is no
word for that amount of time and no word for that large number several 100
trillion years is my way of making you think about a very, very long time.
And even if processor speeds increased enough to shorten that time span,
the speed of transformation would vastly exceed the capacity of the human
eye to stabilize the field of black and white squares into an image. Mhm
manned american ounces print Wikipedia similarly as both a utilitarian
visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic
gesture towards the challenge of going in an episiotomy of big data. Like
every icon, it is a visualization although whereas Simon is visualizing a
system that represents simple sequences. Only manned Berg is visualizing a
representation of knowledge and more epistemological dense proposition.
Indeed. And like every icon, it refers poetically outside itself to
meditate on the nature of information, the volume of information that can
be contained and processed individually and collectively. Now the notion
of information is reconfigured when it is unfolded into the universe of
big data. On the one hand, the first part of this declaration seems a
straightforward statement. It is a mysterious material instance creation,
and thus it could be argued more than a visualization as visualizations
are often screen based and two dimensional with notable exceptions, like
not only me box baskets that you see here,
it is utilitarian in that it supplies access in an organized fashion to an
informational database. It represents an attempt at total ized knowledge,
but to what kind of knowledge are we referring is this in fact the largest
accumulation of human knowledge. A contemporary library of alexandria.
What kind level description of knowledge is contained in the animals of
the Wikipedia archives. one might argue that it is not scholarly text, but
merely collectively amalgamated. Haphazard information. A collage of
everyday points of reference utilize ubiquitously ubiquitously while Simon
simultaneously ostensibly untrusted,
it might be knowledge light.
This is where the second half of the above quotation becomes relevant. It
refers to the challenge of knowing what to count as information. The
challenge of what it means to know at all. Furthermore does the
descriptive model set forth and Wikipedia conform to the episiotomy of big
data. The database is itself, of course, an exemplar of big data form, but
its contents call into question the assumption of veracity often attached
to data as a quantitative, scientifically verifiable truth.
Manda burger is described by the new york times is an interdisciplinary
artist. There is a strong conceptual element to his work, but it is it is
a sly conceptualism that calls upon the ideation all realm while also
engaging social, historical, political, economic, and aesthetic aspects of
materiality Rather than emphasizing de materialization in the classic mode
of 1970s conceptualism.
In part this occurs, I would argue, because artists in the 1970s were
interrogating the burgeoning information world. The transposition of
materiality into informatics, feedback loops of signals and noise
manifested most prominently in computational machines. As a result, the
vital center of the universe was no longer located in material forms, but
rather in the circulation of information. By 2016 computation in the
informatics paradigm have become so endemic. The informational quantities
and big data seemed to have superseded materiality as the fundamental
explanatory devices describing and driving biological life and the
physical structures containing it. Here we may be reminded of another
earlier artwork, and this is my last one. I'll talk about. It begins to
experiment with the parsing and circulation of information contained
innocent semi quantified um deal with Art and languages. Index 01 of 1972
exhibited a documented five in kassel Germany. The work consisted of a
collection of the artist's writing writings enclosed in eight violent
cabinets. Each filing cabinet contained six drawers and which were filed
index cards on which texts were printed cold from self publications, art
magazines, catalogs and manuscripts texts were divided into sections to
which numbers were upended, corresponding numbers were printed on the
drawers of the filing cabinets. Complex intersections deemed compatible,
incompatible and not comparable or transformational were assigned to inter
textual relationships made possible by combining number of elements in
different ways and photos. DATs, charting these evaluations were posted on
the gallery walls to accompany and annotate the information contained in
the filing cabinets. The various informational pathways and relationships
between textual elements were made putatively available for viewers to to
peruse at their leisure. But the work was more fundamentally about the
unavailability, invisibility or in digestibility of information rather
than its submission, either for visual delectation or for an efficient
transmission. Despite eras of philosophical rigor afforded by for the by
the documentation printed on the photos, dots
are in language did not posit a totality of knowledge, but rather a
competent story mode of text mining. It certainly addressed as Warren Sapp
has argued database aesthetics aurally hypertext aesthetics, through its
explicit invitation to the viewer to create languages between texts and
ideas rather than viewing writings as discrete, self contained arguments
or entities.
Likewise, print Wikipedia invites viewers to experience Wikipedia as a
volumetric phenomenal logically encompassing but necessarily quixotic body
of information. It is both present to the viewer as a notional, usable,
notionally usable quantity of data but caught in the space of potentiality
of always almost tangible. Itty of partiality of availability for purchase.
It is latent with possibility. But like the paper layering the walls of
the gallery, it is a promise of informatics. Utopia that can quite
intentionally never reach apotheosis. Thanks.
Yeah. Okay.
Okay. So our mild mannered english professor refugee from provincial
Silicon Valley to Metropolitan. Uh Metropolitan Tempe is also the founding
director of the Center for Science in the imagination. And is that housed
inside your school where that stand alone? No, that's that's often another
issue ASU dimension. Yeah, sure. Um but I love being part of an
institution where a mild mannered english Professor Professor is a
professor in a school that has engineering in the title. Uh he's in the
school of art media and Engineering. Um he is also in the department of
english but that seems to be just one of the various places he dances. He
dances through. He's a historian and theoretician and thinker of and about
books. He's working on a book about the social lives of books which
mandatory witticism here fairly lame g when I was young. Books was where
you went when you didn't have a social life. Um but he knows things that
we didn't know back then. And that's one reason we bring him around this
evening. Professor Ed Finn, please come to the market.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gonna come up here so I can gesticulate more freely uh, in the spirit of
Knowledge Light, I have prepared for you. I have improvised four chapters
on the future of the book. And uh feel free to fact check me as we go
along. So the first chapter is about books as technologies,
if you think about it. And one of the things that I think is most powerful
about Michael's installation and this project is that the codex is an
incredibly sophisticated technology. Uh, I see many of our colleagues from
the libraries here and I know you're all sort of nodding your heads and
this is old information, but uh, we don't for the rest of us, we don't
often actually paused to think about How the book, the Codex is a
technology that's been perfected over the course of 500 years and arguably
connects to the older technological development of writing. Uh and that
technology is very sophisticated. And one of the really interesting things
I see in the future of the book is people trying to replicate that online
, trying to create e books that were just like print books do. And they're
always disappointing because they're never as good as print books. If you
think about the print book, it's got almost infinite stories, depending on
how wide the margins are. It requires very low power, like maybe what? 25
watts, 40 watts to read it at night. It's solar power during the day. Uh
it's uh, it's more durable as a storage medium than basically any
technological digital medium that we've created thus far. Um I don't know
unless you want to make an argument for the Voyager spacecraft that's got
its gold plates of Mozart and math sailing grandly out the solar system.
But uh, it's pretty good. You know, we've used it for a while, we've
tested it out, we're aware of its its flaws and uh, and it works pretty
well. Uh and as you think about its evolution, uh the encyclopedia has
always been a really important part of the innovation of the print book, I
think about the uh the great monument, the 7 51 encyclopedia francaise uh
which did a number of really alarming weird and innovative things like uh
alphabetize ng was still kind of new, but other people have done that, but
it also organized everything into this tripartite structure of knowledge
where uh Lordy God was like on the same page with everybody else and part
of the hierarchy and not just at the top of the hierarchy. Um, and uh, you
know, there are a lot of people who argue that the, that that book, that
technology and the third technology that that was really powerful. There
was the creation of, of hyper looking cross links and cross references
across different entries, which was another way to demonstrate the
interweaving and threading of knowledge. A lot of people say that that
book caused the french revolution. Uh but I think maybe a more interesting
and more beautiful statement about it is the way that robert Darnton, one
of the great historians of that, of that project, described the way that
uh uh linen would leave the back door of the bourgeois french households
as that was sold to rag men and then it would come back in the front door
as pages of the encyclopedia. That this was a very elaborate technological
material, consumer production process. And it was really hard, you know,
nobody wanted to invest in this because it was such a crazy project. So
books are technology and I find it really fascinating to hear your
technical description of how hard it was to actually take Wikipedia and
turn it into a print book, which involved not just you know, the 24 hours
uh seven, I wish I wish I'd remembered that so I could repeat it again
because it's so incredible that not just the time, the 24 plus hours it
took to upload this thing. Two, 24 days. Alright, excuse me, I'm sorry. So
, so be little thank you. Yeah. Um so so yeah, 24 days. Uh seven hours, 13
minutes. Is that it? Okay. All right, okay. Uh that was just one part of
it. Right? That was that was just uh one component of this process that
also involved uh you know, at different stages working with lulu dot com,
this this print on demand service and working here with with colleagues to
and students to get this thing printed out. Books are sophisticated
technologies and to to do that. You had to take Wikipedia, which is a very
interesting thing, will come back to this, this question of what Wikipedia
is. Um and you had to take it and you had to you had to do the the book
thing. You have to take it and you have to make PDFs of it. You have to
turn it into a series of pictures and freeze it like uh that people call
it, putting a book under glass. That's the book experience right now,
right? You can sort of see the book in there, it looks a lot like a book,
but you can't actually touch it, you can't get to the book, you can just
sort of approach it through this impermeable corning where layer
Chapter two Books Our Communities. So I had a high school teacher who used
to talk always it was my latin teacher and used to talk about how it's
time to break bread with the dead and what you do when you read is you're
breaking bread, you're communing with these people who might be your
contemporaries or they might have been alive centuries ago. And so again,
being in a library is a is a place where you feel that I'm reminded of
terry pratchett, wonderful notion of l space that books are magic. I have
this discussion now with my with my toddler that books really do have
magic in them. They are magical objects. And when you put them together,
the magic sort of multiplies. Uh, and a lot of that magic has to do with
that notion of community, that notion of being able to reach other people
and other times, uh, in a way that's uh unique to human experience, the
only thing we have right now that comes close to the notion of telepathy
is the novel, right? Or the literary experience, because language is the
first technology we came up with and it's the one, Well, I don't know,
fact check me on that, but it's uh it's certainly been maybe the most
fundamental for the human experience in establishing that sense of
community. And books are the vessels for that, right? They accumulate all
of the temporal experience. Uh, if you think about the 7.5 million people
who've contributed to Wikipedia and imagine all of the the hours days, the
millions of years probably that went into that have been layered into this
, this this object or this project. Um, uh, books are really fascinating
communities and projects like Wikipedia are not just any kind of community.
They're also fan communities and I think it's really important to point
that out. And I think this is something that Michael has addressed in some
of his other work that that comes with all of the pluses and minuses of
fan communities, fans are passionate, they're engaged. They also uh I want
to be part of something and part of being part of something often means
figuring out how others cannot be part of that thing. And so Wikipedia has
been challenged as something that is technically a completely open and
accessible project. But that in reality often tends to exclude people who
uh I don't know the sort of the Lexicon and the norms of that community.
Uh and Fascinatingly, uh fact check me on this, but as I understand it,
the community is widely skewed, it's about 90% male and 10% female in
terms of its user base. And I think this is this is part of the project
that Michael's engagement and sort of bringing feminism to Wikipedia and
opening up a larger conversation about that. But you should really ask him
about that. So I won't put any more words in his mouth. Um, but uh you
know, being a fan community is uh is not something that we should uh as as
academics or scholars sort of smile at Wikipedia and said, well of course
, you know, Wikipedia does that because you know, what is the O E. D. But
a fan community, the people who have contributed to the O. E. D. These
crazy word hunters who track down neologisms and you know, try and find
the first instance when somebody said McGuffin, you know this is this is
not something you do for the big bucks. Uh This is something you do to to
break bread with the dead and it's something you do to become part of a
community of fellow weirdoes. Um And what are we if not uh you know,
accumulated aggregated communities of fellow weirdos here. So So the book
is a community in a way that leads up to to my two Chapter 3. It's a it's
a it's a it's a vehicle. It's a platform. The book is a place for bringing
people together. So if you think about it, there are a lot of really clear
examples of that books that you you remember and that you might even have
that visceral physical Ithaca like tug to return to uh ulysses is a is a
place, right? A ulysses is a place you can return to when you pick up that
book and read it again. Uh For many of us, the most powerful books in our
lives are uh places that we return to over the years and that remind us of
the people we were the last time we visited. Just like we would if we were
going to a physical place. Uh And uh books are physical places and that
they have geography ease. Those hyperlinks. Those cross references are
pathways uh telecom Calvino is wonderful book. Invisible cities. I think
it maybe makes this this point most beautifully that uh language itself is
the way that we construct reality. And so not only are books places, but
all of our places are constructed out of language. They're constructed out
of memory and imagination and desire and books are uh I'm glad we also
brought up the notion of abstraction. Uh books are abstraction made
concrete, right? And that's a very interesting notion. Uh their
technologies, their communities, their places, that uh first make that
critical step of taking lived experience and somehow translating it into
an ethereal thing, something that can be multiplied and copied and moved
around and stored for centuries. Uh but the that even essence thing that
is the idea of a book also exists in physical form. Uh there's a wonderful
recent novel called the Raw Shark tests, but shark texts by uh british
author named Stephen Hall uh that imagines a man struggling with a growing
conviction that that all of reality is is semiotic, that, you know, the
floor is made up of words and letters and uh he's he's pursued by this uh
oh gosh, what kind of a shark is it? I've forgotten a conceptual shark,
He's consumed by a giant conceptual shark. And this is very serious
business. Um but that notion that language constructs the world around us
is inescapable. You know, no matter how many layers of mediation, how many
layers of uh of performance you try and put on it, there's always this
sense that we, you know, there's a reality of of of ideas that are
expressed in language and also, you know, memories and other experiences
that can only be shared and communicated through language. Uh languages.
That one thing uh getting back to that notion of telepathy, This is
something that David Foster Wallace also talked about. Language is the one
thing that we can use to bridge that loneliness between us. And so I think
this project is quite powerful in that way as well. When you think about
that appendix with the 7.5 million people, the lists of names who all
contributed to this uh that this is a kind of a record. It's like a guest
log, right? Uh And when you look at Wikipedia online and you see the time
stamps and the I. P. Addresses and the the names, the biography is often
the personal details of these people who are contributors and editors. Uh
there is this sense of these long tendrils of human experience, memory uh
and geography and history that are attached to that. And so the all of
that that that vast multi dimensional abstraction, you know, concrete ties
into this experience here again is very powerful because we can see the
scope of it. We can try to come to terms with the incredible scope of it.
Last chapter. It's alive. Books are alive. Um They are alive first in the
sense that they're mortal books or mortal artifacts. This is something
else that I think our colleagues in the libraries are keenly aware of, um
they bear the scars of their passage through the world. They have uh
adolescence is and Middle ages and son essences books can die. It's very
rare, There's sort of vampire like, but you can do it if you're really
devoted to it and uh they grow and change in part because they are members
of these communities or they are the platforms, the places where
communities gather. Uh The novel Frankenstein is a lovely example of that.
It's a it's a story that has evolved and changed over time. Almost as
soon as it was published, it began to grow and morph and become this
adaptive myth. That's now a pervasive story that uh everybody has heard of.
Uh stay tuned because you will hear more about that in the next couple of
years. So
books are also alive in the sense that there they're organisms. Uh so they
grow, they change not just in the ways that they're reflected, uh, you
know, out to us or the ways that we we ingest a book and we carry around
little pieces of it in our minds, but they're also organisms in the in the
sense that they have internal structure. Um they have histories that can
be histories that uh that start when they're first conceived, when they
when they exist in manuscript form. And uh there's the wonderful fill a
logical tradition of figuring out how books evolved over time. Uh, and I
think what's so fascinating again about this project about this physical
instance, creation of Wikipedia is that it's, in one sense, a snapshot. Uh
, but I think it's a better way to describe it or maybe just an extension
of that would be to call it something like a high school yearbook photo.
Right. We're still in Wikipedia's awkward adolescence and we have this
two dimensional photographic representation of the thing and all of its
weird and multi furious, you know, four dimensional, possibly more
dimensional glory. And so, uh, I want to close with
this idea. This notion of books is things that grow and Wikipedia as part
of this quest for knowledge, which is a topic I'm really fascinated with
as well, MEREDITH. And uh I think about the, I think about a project I saw
a few years ago at a conference by the poet john kelly and he had written
a script to uh work through word lists and put them together and then
search google to see what results came up. And every time that his script
came up a string of with a string of words that got no results back from
google that would become the next line of the poem because then it was, he
knew that it was an original work of art. Uh that was the, that was that
was the conceptual project of his work and I really like that because it's
uh it's it's a very interesting counterpoint to Wikipedia, right.
Wikipedia is not about uh doing the thing that's never been done before.
Wikipedia is about capturing everything that's ever been done right. Um,
and because it has this fan community and it has the people who are
excited about it, it, you know, they're the marvel universe is very
thoroughly covered. Uh you know, minor characters in on a car nina
possibly less well covered. Uh, but one day presumably we'll get there
right, we'll arrive at the promised land where everything will be in
Wikipedia. And uh, the, you know, the number of volumes and the number of
contributors will grow to include all of us. And in some bore his like,
magical future. Library Wikipedia will include the story of all of our
lives and all of our possible lives. And so I think that's a pretty good.
That's a pretty good place to stop to think about that as the myth of the
future of the book. The quest for knowledge and stan she hated in a book
that is just as alive as we are.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah.
And I'm not sure I share your faith. I've been thinking here listening
that in some ways, language and number are starting to fail us. Uh, the
world has always been too big for them, but we've lived for a very long
time with the idea that you can put words around it, you can count it, you
can count just about everything. And I was hearing all three of you
describing a space in which you really can't count everything. Um it's if
Wikipedia is a pokey little corner of the internet and it's this big and
it's all growing as fast as the big bang is making the universe grow. We
lose the traditional enterprise loses and we need other tools to think
about how we manage some kind of conscious control over the space around
us. Well, thank you all very provocative. Obviously we can take a few
minutes for questions and comments from anyone as we said before. Best we
can immortalize you if you come up here to the microphone and the lights
and at the very least we would like to get you to the microphone. I
realize this puts a boldness test on you but I see boldness happening. So
uh please come on up. Sure. So I think you need to be in the bright lights
in the big city up here all the way up all the way up. We want to see you
as well as here. Hello, That is very bright. Um Monica green. I'm in
history here on the Tempe campus um when I heard about this and it was
only just a couple of days ago that we got the notice um about this
session. My first thought was that oh that's just like the human genome
project book um in London and I have seen the human genome a project book
in London and have been awed by it but then walked out of the room. Um I
mean I didn't do anything more for me um and so I would like to hear more
about what is the physical impact um that uh that we're looking for with
with with Wikipedia that it is something more than the human genome is a
fixed thing. It's not growing changing. I mean it is growing um it's
certainly changing. Um but certainly not at the speed that Wikipedia's so
I'd like some some comment on that. Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Um I'm not I think I'm
really interested in I'm unaware of the human genome book at that. I think
that's really interesting um um I'm not really sure um that
so I think some of the things I've said already are really and I think
that you know others have sort of underscored them is that this is this
it's a paradox, right? The work is a kind of paradox. Um it does and
doesn't do the thing that it's supposed to do and it's pushing back and
forth at the ways in which
information worked and works. Um and what in the book form and the way it
worked and continues to work. You know as you know you're talking about
and the way in which it works uh in a digital form and I think that Jim
has pointed out that this is a point where we all talked about like it's a
point where the information escapes our ability to um grasp it and it's a
representation of that.
I don't know if that is what you're looking for but I think that's what I
would say to that. Mhm. I think that's one of the difficulties of um
information visualization representation of any kind is that it is an
attempt to give some kind of phenomenal logical richness to information,
right, data visualization. So the history of low project that I showed
that's a graph basically um is uh you know trying to embed you phenomena
logically in big data. Um but does it achieve that? And um this project
gives you a different kind of experience and that it gives you a tactile,
partially partially a tactile experience of information. And then it pulls
away by giving you 166 volumes instead of 7000 volumes or whatever. And so
so it is that like I called it quixotic or it's you know it's it's
paradoxical or what have you. So it's it there's a phenomenal logical
problem with representation of data of big data because it does escape the
human sensory um kind of it every that every intersection. Thank you.
Okay. Yeah. The human genome project book. Mhm. Not having seen it but my
guess is it doesn't have much plot except
on another level. It's got the entire plot of human history wrapped up
inside it. But it's undetectable. This project at least is playing in the
space of the book and lends itself to being thought about this way, even
though it also, it also escapes fascinating. Yes. Okay, come on.
Funny to be called up here to ask questions. I'm Gregory sale and I teach
in the school of art and I was really excited when I heard that Michael's
project was coming here um in part because of the ways in which he was
taking something that so much I am pursuing as a social practice artist.
That was such a social practice entity. Um Wikipedia. And then he was
reverting it back into this realm of almost like a studio practice artist
by himself, essentially to help it find form. Um but from his, his solo
authorship and so that was interesting to me and I want to acknowledge
something MEREDITH opened a gateway for me when she was talking about the
sort of loose collective in in England art and language. And one of the
things that aren't in language did for maybe 25 years was that they had a
practice um that was approved by the government of doing um embedded
artist with different types of agencies and and public agencies. And I
what it helped me do MEREDITH was to really think about the ways and
Michael is a self proclaimed uh embedded artist or artist in residence for
Wikipedia. And he started in this sort of fictitious space of holding up
this house of cards. And then Wikipedia embraced him and made him their
own. And uh, and in the same way, uh, then this is where the work gets
even more interesting to me, is that when the peace and correct me if I'm
wrong here jim. But you have acquired this as part of the permanent
collection of the library and a kind of way. And, and so in in another way
, Michael then becomes another embedded artist and he's embedded artist
with the library and not just the specific library, but the model of
libraries. And um, and and hats off to the museum for seeing that and kind
of coming in as uh, as an usher. Um anyway, I'm thinking out loud here,
but I just want to sort of put that out for comment.
I really recommend everyone when you go over there. Look um about two rows
down as you come in on the right about my shoulder level, um, in between
the reddish encyclopedia and babble Unraveled is one volume, the first
volume of print Wikipedia shelved um in the stacks with a call number on
it, which is a kind of embedded Nous
Michael. I was going to say exactly the same thing because he pointed it
to me yesterday. Our staff had surprised me with that. I have said, let's
get a couple of volumes just for the collection before this ever happened.
But I hadn't seen it is startling when you see it on the left wall,
you're meant to be playing it off against what's on the right shelves. But
when one of them sneaks across and sucks up a call number, it's
masquerading as something else. And pulling it off quite well Maryland.
We're going to say something Okay, No else. Yes, come on up.
Uh huh. Say who you are and what you do. So, um my name is Susie morgan
and I am a conservator. So I'm the one who will fix your Wikipedia book
when it falls apart eventually, because it was printed by lulu, which
isn't really great what they do. Um but I'm also really interested. It's
just the nature of modern books. I'm sorry. Um I'm also interested in
digital preservation. And so this project really intrigues me because
there's a physical component, but then there's also the code you used it.
And um for people who are digital and media art conservators, the code is
very, very important. So I'm wondering in 100 years, what really is the
core of this? Is it the wallpaper? Is it the print books, is that the code
you use? It is the documentation of your process. What do you expect or
hope to be preserved in the future because also I know with the code
theoretically you could recreate it, but You know, 50 years from now, five
years from now it's going to be the number of volumes will be different.
The content will be different. Um, so I would just like to hear what your
thoughts are on that as as the artist because these are the things that my
profession is thinking about and worrying about. Um, and trying to figure
out what you're thinking. So we know what is important to save.
So we could probably sit down and talk about this for like five hours
because it's a real thing. Um, I will point at a couple of different
things. Um, one of them is that there's a digital conservator who focuses
on media art named Ben Fino Raton. Um I've known for some time who's doing
really important work as is dragon espen shied at rhizome about trying to
solve this problem. One of one of the things Ben says is every time
somebody talks about new media art or digital media as de materialized,
hard drive fails somewhere.
So with that as a context. Um, one thing I can point to is something
called the variable media initiative, um which is a project that was
spearheaded by Christiane paul and john paul ido when john was at the
Whitney in the late nineties, early two thousands. You have to fact there
has been a day of calling out fact checking, right, citation needed, um
which is what is said on Wikipedia. Um, so exactly the date there. But the
idea of the variable and the media initiative, which has been played out
elsewhere and adopted as a model is that you ask the artist exactly that
um is this supposed to be recreated in a new language? Can you use a video
of the code running? Um Do you show images instead of the thing? Do you
just say it's dead end of story?
And I've gone through that question with a number of my projects actually
because You know, my first new media work I made in 2001, that's 15 years
ago. Um thankfully that one, those two are like pretty stable. They're
really pretty simple. Um and some of the work I made in between then and
now um has died. Um 11, so let's see one got one was an early blog, 2000
five.
something called Easy Mo Blog. Yeah, you've never heard of that. It was
before. Wordpress was really standard. I needed something that would work
with mobile. I used the software, it was open source. That's awesome. It
wasn't super well maintained. Somebody found a back door. No, no, not that
they just comment, spammed it to death and and then it sort of got taken
down by the by turbulence who had commissioned it because it was just like
, it was just full of comments spam and they were starting to get, you
know, it was affecting. I think that they were being viewed as a malicious
site because there was all these bad links going off of it. Um So they
took the site down
um and then I had the bandwidth to recreate it like a year or two later. I
thought you know I should really re create this and I went about doing it.
They're like okay we'll turn the site back on but the site was no longer
connected to the database.
I don't know the database might have been destructed
but here's what's awesome.
Archive dot org had a copy of it. So rebuild
from archive dot org as static html. So one of the things I've started
doing with a lot of my web works is creating static html versions of what
our dynamic sites um uh use like what's called an offline browser which is
like a flashback to, I don't know, 1997 8 when um you'd have to like take
your phone line off use and use it to check all your stuff and you just
say I want to download this whole website and it's gonna take me five
minutes to download it. Um and then you can talk on your phone again while
you spend the next hour looking at the website. So it does that it
recreates the entire structure as if this dynamic website were. Html. Um
The firefox browser plug ins, the gym mention one of which um converts all
the prices on a given web page into all the prices and do the equivalent
value and barrels of oil sort of still works and I could actually re
create it, things change the structure of that feed from the new york,
mercantile exchange changes. Um, Firefox changes its requirements so that
I don't think that one works right now, but it could be recreated. The
real costs is a lot harder because it's built off of which it inserts
carbon footprints into airplane travel websites. That one
is a much more complicated process of finding the place in the code to
insert that little bit of html that's based off the calculation. Um, it
has to look for specific CSS markers in order to say right before this,
right after this one, insert the insert this little snippet of html that's
been created based off of whatever
and myself with javascript. And that changes because websites get
overhauled every 3-5 years, like completely changed entirely. So it's just
a, it's, you know, chasing a moving target in that regard. I was really
lucky. Again, there's a lot of luck involved here in this period in the
middle before I realized it was a problem, I was very lucky that I had
made videos of, of both of those working there very short. I didn't really
do really substantial documentation, but they're like Short two minute,
three minute demo videos that give you enough of the picture that that is
what will probably be shown for those. I hadn't actually, I don't, I mean
, okay, let's be So I spent six years working on this. But like we showed
this nine months ago and I haven't had enough distance from it to really
think about that question. It's a really good question. And I don't know
the answer in this case. I do know um that the one good thing is that java
is actually a very stable language. Um even though there's questions about
whether certain operating systems will support it natively because of
whatever that's boring unless there any computer scientists in the room.
Um, But it's a very it's a 15 year old 20 year old language that doesn't
change really, it doesn't substantially change unlike some of the other
languages, which change pretty frequently. So that'll probably be pretty
fairly stable. Um like as in like there was a period of three years where
I didn't work on this project and I came back to it installed all of it
somewhere else and it worked once I figured and remember how to install it
all, which is kind of unusual in the world of new media art in digital
media. Um, but I actually feel like in this case
it's in a way the idea itself that is the core of the work. Um And that
the way to do it would be too, because Wikipedia will be different. That
data structure will be different. They'll be different software etc, that
it will probably end up like 100 years from now. You'll probably end up
doing the software recreation mode 100 years from now. 15 years from now.
Different story.
And um I'm curious to know more about the we can talk afterwards about the
lulu issues because they are it is acid free. It's about as archival, as
profound A man can get what's that? Is it sound? Where do you sit down the
I think that the that's a good question, but I think that the signatures,
the signal. I think there's like signatures. I will say that it's a very
it's apparently maybe there aren't. I'm not sure. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah,
that was a long answer. I'm sorry. But it's like For Librarians. Suzy is
going to get one. We might look for librarians and archivists. It's a
really important question. Um and it's become a very important question
for artists because we realize, you know, 50. I mean, new media art is
what I don't know, 40 years old at the longest one you count. It may be
Like he became great, rose to prominence in the mid 90s. What's that? It's
adhesive bound? Okay, blue is not your friend. No. No. So, so we'll see
what happens. You're really gonna have to take good care of these. You
realize because this is just a Yeah, I mean, I'll frame it slightly
differently also, which is that if one of the books catches on fire, like
we can replace it right for now. That's also part of it, right? It's these
things are fungible. Mhm Yeah. He's like, yeah, we'll see about that
anybody else were torn at this moment between still having some treats
over there and wanting to mingle a bit. But if there was somebody else
going once try sure. Gordon? I just wanted to say
Gordon Knox from the art museum. This is such a great collaboration. It's
such a great um presentation and it's such a fabulous project. And you two
on the outside your uh I mean the way you packaged this has been just
really, really a stimulating, interesting evening. I'm excited and
interested to see that we have questions about permanence and how are we
going to um identify the endless life and the immortal ization that this
piece of art is doing when in fact, as you said, it's the idea of the
piece that really is the most important. And the idea, at least for my
sitting there and listening is really about the fact that this is a story
about a collective project of information that's growing so fast. We can't
get our hands around it. As Ed said, it's alive. It's bigger than us. It's
going to move faster than us. It requires abstraction to even begin to get
our arms around it. And if you do the reading people are understanding
that to mind. Big data, you've got to do it through machine learning. You
actually create algorithms that teach itself how to make sense of what
it's going through. So as we relinquish our presence and certainly that we
relinquish the top post and the pyramid of intelligent beings to the
collective output of intelligence that we put together. I think it's quite
all right for us to also give up the immortalizing permanence of the
object. But I, you know, going through all those places and hearing you
guys talk has just been a really fabulous evening and I just want to thank
you so much for having put it together and thank you for bringing it here.
So I'll do a last word and say, I think we'll know when this project
changes decisively. I'll make it to be this space. We're gonna want to
renovate this whole space. But there will be undergraduates coming through
this particular space for a long time to come by any reasonable prediction.
And I think the magical moment will come when somewhere in my advanced
old age, I'm standing here talking to some 19 year old saying, and we had
this fabulous exhibit. It was about Wikipedia put in print and when the
kid looks at me and says, what's Wikipedia? Yeah, then you'll have another
challenge for how you think about this and how you archiving and what you
make of and I hope we have enough traces left that I'll be able to explain
what Wikipedia was to some kid here. Listen folks, thank you all very much
, join me in, thanking our folks here and join us and stay for a few more
treats before you go. Thank you and good night.