# Printing Out the Internet 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. ## Origin Goldsmith launched the effort on May 22nd, 2013 by starting a single-topic Tumblr blog and posting an open call for submissions[3]. 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 JSTOR[1]. Goldsmith told Yahoo he wanted to 'materialize and actualize' the volume of information Swartz had tried to free[1]. 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 date[2]. - **Platform:** Tumblr / news coverage (viral spread) - **Creator:** Kenneth Goldsmith - **Date:** 2013 ## 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 printouts[1][2]. 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 composition[1]. 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 gallery[1]. 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. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Printing Out the Internet? A 2013 conceptual art project by Kenneth Goldsmith asking the public to print pages from the web and mail them to LABOR gallery in Mexico City as a tribute to Aaron Swartz[1]. ### Where did Printing Out the Internet come from? Goldsmith announced the project on a Tumblr blog on May 22nd, 2013, months after Swartz's January suicide[3]. ### What does Printing Out the Internet mean? It was framed as a memorial to Swartz and an extension of Goldsmith's 'uncreative writing' practice, testing whether the web's scale could be made physical[1]. ### How do you use Printing Out the Internet? Participants printed anything they wanted from the web, from Gmail inboxes to Wikipedia pages, and shipped the paper to LABOR gallery before the July 26th opening[1]. ### Is Printing Out the Internet still popular? The installation ended on August 31st, 2013 and is now remembered as a landmark work of early 2010s internet art rather than an active project[3]. ## References 1. [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333114/Kenneth-Goldsmith-plans-print-entire-Internet-new-exhibit--needs-YOUR-help.html]() 2. [https://www.labor.org.mx/en]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/printing-out-the-internet]() 4. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqHaKniXkF8]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/printing-out-the-internet Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library