Excerpt from The New York Times:
The Wikipedia entry for “quixoticism” runs only about 255 words. But if anyone could argue for a personal mention, it might be Michael Mandiberg.
For the past three years, he has been fully engaged in a project that might make even the most intrepid digital adventurer blush: transforming the English-language Wikipedia into an old-fashioned print reference set running to 7,600 volumes.
Mr. Mandiberg, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, describes the project as half utilitarian data visualization project, half absurdist poetic gesture.
“When I started, I wondered, ‘What if I took this new thing and made it into that old thing?’ ” he said in a recent interview in his sparse, white-walled studio in Downtown Brooklyn. “ ‘What would it look like?’ ”
On Thursday, he and the rest of the world will find out, when the exhibition “From Aaaaa! To ZZZap!,” based on his larger project “Print Wikipedia,” opens at the Denny Gallery on the Lower East Side. There, Mr. Mandiberg will hit “start” and a computer program will begin uploading the 11 gigabytes of very compressed data from a Mac Mini to the print-on-demand website Lulu.com.
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