Printing press and the spread of books made the acquisition of knowledge available to anyone. Marshall McLuhan's term, the Gutenberg galaxy, refers to a period of cultural history, in which the book as an information provider plays a significant role. Because of the development of new knowledge acquisition methods by means of the development of information technology, television and the Internet, sooner or later we reach an era when printed matter is no longer necessary.

By examining the changes of information acquisition methods it turns out that Wikipedia occupies a very important place and entails the most important signs of information society and digitization at the same time. Wikipedia recently became the main source for searching for information. The english version has approximately 1.7 million articles, which is edited by a community of 5.5 million people making Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia ever assembled. It can be realised easily that this vast amount of information becomes useless in printed form.

The Out of Print installation is continuously printing Wikipedia, one article every minute. Our proposition is exaggerated on purpose. We would like to emphasize the absurdity of the idea, and the increasing amount of information we have to deal with. The piece comments on the changing role of books, shows the lexically incomprehensible amount of information. It also illustrates our affection to paper and reinterprets the Gutenberg heritage.

Visualisation

Sponsors

Out of Print was commissioned by the POSZT festival.
We are grateful to H2G2 for their generous hardware support.

Credits

Out of Print is a collaborative project by Melinda Sipos, András Böröcz and Gabor Papp

Follow the development progress of the project through our blog at
http://oopproject.blogspot.com/ (in Hungarian).