Poet Plans To 'Print Out The Internet'

You may be aware that the Internet is kinda big. So the suggestion that it could be printed out and publicly displayed seems, at best, overly ambitious. Still, Kenneth Goldsmith is giving it a try. The artist and poet is rallying lovers of controversial art to help him print out as much of the Interwebs as possible, for an exhibition to run from July 26th in Mexico.

Why?

The project’s Tumblr is calling for submissions from anyone, anywhere; as long as it exists online, it’s acceptable. Contributors can send a single A4 sheet or “a truckload”; Goldsmith has over 500 square metres to dedicate to the project, which will be displayed at Mexico City’s LABOR Gallery. Printing Out The Internet will be exhibited in honour of Aaron Swartz, the programmer and online activist who committed suicide earlier this year. Swartz had been facing up to 50 years in prison after making academic articles from subscription-only archive JSTOR publicly available. The unusual idea may not come as a surprise to those familiar with Goldsmith’s style of poetry – it’s not quite Wallace Stevens. Goldsmith believes in ‘uncreativity as a creative practice’. His works include transcribing a full edition of the New York Times (Day, 2003) and recording every movement made by his body over a 13-hour period (Fidget, 1999).

Can you actually 'print the Internet'?

As I write this, the indexed web contains at least 4.69 billion pages – and it’s growing every second. So it's safe to say that actually printing the whole Internet is pretty impossible. However,  Techhive has done the math on how much paper it would require to actually this feat (hint: it's a lot). A Change.org petition has attracted around 200 signatures calling on Goldsmith to scrap the project, despite plans to recycle all contributions after the exhibition closes, claiming it's a pointless waste of resources. Goldsmith’s response? “All art is spectacle; all spectacle is material; and all material must come from somewhere.” Aside from there being a vast and constantly expanding number of pages on the world wide web in general, there’s also a disturbing amount of illegal and obscene content. So far, Goldsmith doesn't seem to have addressed whether his show will be a free-speech free-for-all, or if there will be restrictions on the content that can be included in the exhibition. We're concerned that a project initiated by a man who believes ‘if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist’, may inspire a number of participants to continue this line of thinking by providing examples of Rule 34.