Wikipedia Art

Wikipedia Art

Production country: 
za
us
Year: 
2009
Edition: 
2011
Format: 
conceptual
hacktivism
net
process

Wikipedia Art is a conceptual art work composed on Wikipedia. Since the work manifested itself as a conventional Wikipedia page, art editors were required to follow Wikipedia’s enforced standards of quality and verifiability meaning that any changes to the art had to be published on, and cited from, 'credible' external sources such as interviews, blogs, or articles in 'trustworthy' media institutions. Thus the artwork would develop and transform itself simply through their writing and talking about it. Wikipedia Art might start as an intervention, turn into an object, die and be resurrected through a creative pattern / feedback loop of publish-cite-transform that were called 'performative citations'.

The ongoing composition and performance of Wikipedia Art is intended to point to the 'invisible authors and authorities' of Wikipedia, and by extension the Internet, as well as the site's extant criticisms: bias, consensus over credentials, reliability, accuracy and vandalism.

According to Stern and Kildall, "like knowledge and like art, Wikipedia Art is always already variable." The artists maintain that the project "intervenes in Wikipedia as a venue in the contemporary construction of knowledge and information, and simultaneously intervenes in our understandings of art and the art object".

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