Kenneth Goldsmith Printed Out 33 GB Of The Internet In Support of Aaron Swartz

Currently sitting in a gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany is a print out of Papers from Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society. This was Kenneth Goldsmith's idea, and it resulted in the printing of around 250,000 sheets of paper. Thomas Piketty's very thick tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century, occupies only about 350 sheets of paper; Infinite Jest is about 550 sheets. These 250,000 sheets of paper are 33 gigabytes made physical, the 33 GB of JStor documents legally obtained and then uploaded to The Pirate Bay by Greg Maxwell on the day after Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was indicted by the US Attorney General's office for his attempt to rip JStor's content out from its pay wall. In a blog post, Goldsmith acknowledges that no one will ever read all the way through these 250,000 pages but still said, “the fact of this material—and its ever-present availability—outweighs what practical applications we might render from it.”

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