Abstract
The Wikipedia Art entry, launched on February 14 2009,1 initially stated:
Wikipedia Art is a conceptual art work composed on Wikipedia, and is thus art that anyone can edit. It manifests as a standard page on Wikipedia—entitled Wikipedia Art. Like all Wikipedia entries, anyone can alter this page as long as their alterations meet Wikipedia’s standards of quality and verifiability.2 As a consequence of such collaborative and consensus-driven edits to the page, Wikipedia Art, itself, changes over time.3
The work is a poetic gesture toward language and collaboration, a nod to the traditions of concept- and networked-based art, and most of all, a performance on, and intervention into, Wikipedia.
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Notes
Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007), 27.
David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2008), 143.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (William James Lectures) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 116.
Performativity as a concept has been appropriated (and thus redefined) by various disciplines over the past several decades, leading performance studies scholar Richard Schechner to declare it “a hard term to pin down” and to dedicate an entire chapter in his book, Performance Studies: An Introduction, to its definition, history, and use. He says that as a noun, a performative——which is no longer necessarily spoken—“does something”; as an adjective—such as what Peggy Phelan calls performative writing——the modifier “inflects … performance” in some way that may change or modify the thing itself; and as a broad term, performativity covers “a whole panoply of possibilities opened up by a world in which differences between media and live events, originals and digital or biological clones, performing onstage and in ordinary life are collapsing. Increasingly, social, political, economic, personal, and artistic realities take on the qualities of performance.” Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 110.
Bruno Latour and Steve Wooglar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 105.
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Paris: A.M. Metailie, 1984).
Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 31.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 19.
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
William Emigh and Susan C. Herring, “Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias,” Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (Los Alamitos: IEEE Press, 2005).
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© 2013 Robert J. Beck
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Kildall, S., Stern, N. (2013). Wikipedia Art: At the Borders of (Wiki) Law, Lawyering, Lobbying, and Power. In: Beck, R.J. (eds) Law and Disciplinarity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318107_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318107_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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