NEW YORK, NY.- Denny Gallery announces the exhibition of From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!, featuring work from the Print Wikipedia series by Michael Mandiberg. It will remain open continuously (24 hours/day) through Sunday, June 21 at 6 p.m. with daily hours thereafter until July 2, 2015.

Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date. The work is also a reflection on the actual transparency or completeness of knowledge containers and history.

The books are microcosms of the world -- amounting to 7,473 volumes of Wikipedia entries, each made up of 700 pages, totaling 5,244,111 pages of text. The installation will include Wikipedia Contributor Appendix: a 36 volume index of the almost 7.5 million named contributors that made at least one edit to the countless entries included in the project. The complete Print Wikipedia also includes the Wikipedia Table of Contents: a 91 volume set.

The exhibition at Denny Gallery will be the performance of the upload of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com (a print-on-demand website), and exhibition of a selection of volumes from the project. The upload process will take between eleven and fourteen days. The gallery will remain open around the clock through the first weekend of the exhibition, in recognition that the computer itself works continuously. There will be two channels for watching this process: a projection of the Lulu.com site in a web browser and a computer monitor with the command line updates showing the dialogue between the code and the site. The script will also post to the @PrintWikipedia Twitter account after it finishes each volume. Individual volumes and the entirety of Print Wikipedia, Wikipedia Table of Contents, and Wikipedia Contributor Appendix will be available for sale. The build and upload process will take place in real time; until this process begins, exact metrics for the scale of the work can only be estimated.

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. He received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and his B.A. from Brown University. His work traces the lines of political and symbolic power online, working on the Internet in order to comment on and intercede in the real flows of information. He sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, and created Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com. He is co-author of Digital Foundations and Collaborative Futures and the editor of The Social Media Reader. A recipient of residencies and commissions from Eyebeam, Rhizome.org, and Turbulence.org, his work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Ars Electronica, ZKM, and Transmediale. A former Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, he is currently Director of the New York Arts Practicum, a co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work has previously been exhibited at Denny Gallery in the exhibition Share This! Appropriation After Cynicism. He has also exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, The New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Jen Beckman Gallery, Parsons’ Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center. His work has been written about in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Berliner Zeitung, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, ARTNews, MOMUS, Flash Art and Artforum.