Printing Out the Internet

2013art projectclassic

Published September 23, 2026

Printing Out the Internet was a 2013 conceptual art project by poet Kenneth Goldsmith asking anyone with a printer to mail pages from the web to a Mexico City gallery as a memorial for Aaron Swartz. The wildly literal premise pulled in over 10 tons of mail from more than 20,000 contributors and became a viral running joke once bloggers started calculating the paper stack in miles.

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Overview

The show ran as a crowdsourced installation at LABOR gallery in Mexico City, which offered 500 square meters of floor space and six-meter ceilings for stacks of submitted printouts12. Goldsmith, the Museum of Modern Art's first Poet Laureate and the founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, framed it as an extension of his 'uncreative writing' practice, where readymade text is the artwork rather than any original composition1. Contributors were told to print anything they found online, from Gmail inboxes to WikiLeaks dumps to full Wikipedia articles, and mail the pages to the gallery1. The finished piece was less a curated show than a random material slice of the 2013 web, dumped in the middle of a Mexican art space.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr / news coverage (viral spread)
Creator
Kenneth Goldsmith
Date
2013

Goldsmith launched the effort on May 22nd, 2013 by starting a single-topic Tumblr blog and posting an open call for submissions3. He dedicated the project to programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, who had died by suicide that January while facing charges over bulk-downloading academic papers from JSTOR1. Goldsmith told Yahoo he wanted to 'materialize and actualize' the volume of information Swartz had tried to free1. LABOR gallery in Mexico City agreed to host the collected paper from July 26th through August 31st, 2013, with the mailing deadline matched to the opening date2.

How It Spread

Coverage rolled out fast in late May, with the Daily Mail interviewing Goldsmith about the impossible scope of filling a 500-square-meter Mexico City gallery with printed web pages1. The backlash escalated just as fast. TechHive calculated that printing the surface web alone would take about 4.73 billion sheets stacked over 305 miles high, and a Change.org petition asking Goldsmith to cancel drew close to 500 signatures3. Bloggers at Motherboard, Art F City and City Lights Booksellers all published opinion pieces on the carbon cost, and mocking tweets got their own aggregator blog. By the exhibition's August 31st close, the gallery had logged more than 10 tons of paper mailed in by over 20,000 contributors3.

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