Trees Be Damned, They're Printing the Internet Anyway

Love him or hate him, Kenneth Goldsmith wasn't bluffing when he said he was going to print out the entire internet back in May. By opening day of the Printing the Internet exhibit at a gallery space in Mexico City Friday, he had accumulated 10 tons of papers covered in internet.

Actually technically, Goldsmith, the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art, didn't print any of it. He crowdsourced the task out, asking people to print out and mail in their own corner of the web. Over the last two months, a stream of printed spam folders, websites, all 6,452 pages of YouPorn, questionably private information like bank statements, credit card numbers, divorce settlements and naked photos, and some creative submissions, including "20 pages of the letter 'A' repeated continuously," and "musical scores to the complete works of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler," have found their way to the LABOR space, the owner of the gallery told the Washington Post.

As if this wasn't asinine enough, there will be a group reading of the entire thing (the YouPorn part should be fun), which they calculate would take 57,000 years if you read nonstop 24/7.

All this despite the fact that people–by and large–think this is a terrible idea. The announcement spurred a tsunami of backlash, mostly in the form of "that's impossible" and "please don't kill all of the trees."

To the first point, obviously it's impossible. Ten tons barely scrapes the surface of all the information in cyberspace, plus more's being produced every minute. Experts have calculated it would take 4.6 billion pages to print the whole of the internet, and that mountain of paper would take up 29,000 cubic meters. That means if in some magical universe the goal was actually achieved, it definitely wouldn't fit in the gallery.

Goldsmith freely admits there's no way in hell to pull the stunt off. It's pataphysical—an absurdist concept beyond metaphysics, expressed as a parody of modern science. "It's an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem," he told the Post.

Saying that you’re going to try to print out the entire internet is like saying you are going to try to live forever. It just can’t be done.

— Printing Internet (@internetprint) July 26, 2013

Part of what the artist is trying to do—the one part that I actually can get behind—is make some concrete sense of the redonkulous amount of data being produced every day, and faster all the time. The internet consists of several petabytes of data—7,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Data is a pretty abstract concept, which is the point, so think of it this way: the world's data would take up over 285 million square feet of space on Earth, about half of Manhattan.

That's an interesting perspective to keep in mind when considering the second point: the glaring environmental eff-you that is printing several tons of paper. Consider the ink, the dead trees, the energy used to mail it all to Mexico, and the CO2 emitted in the process; it's not surprising people are upset.

Motherboard's Ben Richmond calculated that probably 57,600 trees would have to die to print the internet, which is about 140 acres of dense, uniform forest. That's a depressing number of trees to sacrifice to a silly publicity stunt, even if it is raising awareness about the even more acres of Earth being taken up by massive data centers.

The latest post on the project's Tumblr blog, run by UbuWeb, an online archive of avant-garde media founded by Goldsmith, sums up the group's attitude toward the angry environmentalists:

Think of how many invoices could’ve been written on all this paper had we not printed the internet on it. What a waste. Shame on us.

— UbuWeb (@ubuweb) July 31, 2013

Evidently the trees are just an unfortunate casualty of the project's purpose, to provide a commentary about the free flow of information, which is how the internet printing is supposed to be an homage to Aaron Swartz. “Mine is a poetic gesture, a ’pataphysical gesture. His was a political gesture," Goldsmith told the Post.

Swartz was working to liberate information that he thought should be free to all, in the public domain, whereas Goldsmith is liberating it from the binds of digital abstraction. Or something. Goldsmith's oeuvre is a series of head-scratching endeavors–one book is a single day's New York Times transcribed, another is a day of transcribed traffic reports, another is transcribed weather reports, another is a list of every movement he made for a day. He loves transcribing, basically.

If you can spring for a ticket to Mexico City, you can decide for yourself. Or if you can only spring for an international stamp, you too can be an avant-garde artist. The show is accepting submissions throughout its run, until August 26.