'Printing Out the Internet' Exhibit in Mexico is Crowdsourced Work of Art Dan Zak - The Washington Post
go to original July 28, 2013

American poet Kenneth Goldsmith sits amid ten tons of printed paper that are his exhibition, “Printing Out the Entire Internet,” in which he honors open-access internet activist Aaron Swartz inside LABOR, a Mexico City art space. (Janet Jarman/The Washington Post)

The World Wide Web began to show up by snail mail at the end of May. It arrived on sheets of office paper, stacked in white boxes, slipped into bubble-wrapped manila sleeves, folded into a clean, white business envelope with Rosa Parks stamps, stuffed in neon-green packaging from Farmington Hills, Mich. As of this week, 10 tons of pages from the Internet have accumulated at a contemporary art gallery in Mexico City, sent by more than 600 people who bothered to print out portions of the Web and postmark them.

To give some sense of scope: Ten tons is roughly equivalent to the combined weight of three or four baby blue whales. It’s a lot of paper. Yet it’s not even a sliver of the whole Internet.

“There’s very little pornography, and I’m really surprised by that,” says Pamela Echeverría, founder and director of Labor, the art gallery hosting the exhibit. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we’re going to receive really nasty pictures.’ So far, it hasn’t happened.”

Read the rest at The Washington Post

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!