Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act
Wikipedia Art is many things: an open-ended concept, an immanent object, a collaborative text, and a net-work that complicates the very possibility for these distinctions. This chapter most specifically explicates and unfolds the performance of Wikipedia Art as an intervention into, and critical analysis of, Wikipedia: its pages, its system, its volunteers and paid staff. Both the art work and our chapter use and subvert Wikipedia itself – the definitions it puts forward, the discourses engaged by its surrounding community on and off the site, and as a venue/space ripe for intervention. In the chapter, we briefly unpack how the art work speaks back to the structure and performance of Wikipedia, online consensus, the mythologies behind Wikipedia, and Wikimedia’s power more generally.
Download the full chapter (Creative Commons licensed)
Kildall, Scott and Nathaniel Stern. ‘Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act.’ Wikipedia: Critical Point of View. Eds. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (University of Amsterdam), 2011.
Download the full book: Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader (Creative Commons licensed)