VJing by 375 Wikipedians

Greyscale Press

Greyscale Press, ISBN 978-2-9700706-0-3, August 2010, Format: Paperback, 4.25″ x 6.875″, 122 pages
In her introduction, Ana Carvalho describes the production process of this book as a “wiki-sprint.” It is, in fact, the result of gathering together the various people who contributed to the extensive defining of “Vjing” during a week-long writing marathon at the Mapping Festival in Geneva in May 2010. Some of them were physically present, others were online, but people from a number of countries formed the group. This was a motivating factor behind the success of the project, Carvalho argues, because Vjing is intrinsically collaborative. And the Vjing community has often produced understanding of itself from within. Moreover, the paradigmatic wiki process of writing in real time was somehow accelerated, inspired by the results of the day-to-day debate. The wiki page produced is as temporary (or soon to be updated or to evolve into something else) as the very same Vjing practice. The result is amazing and it expresses the most positive aspect of wiki at its core: creating a collectively shared resource generated by the protagonists. It’s impressive to see a technologically networked (and very valuable) outcome as the result of such an intensively collaborative process, generated through an empowered way of communicating. Beyond being finally posted on Wikipedia, the content was edited into a book during another public event – Hyperactivity, a summer lab at Centre d’art de Neuchâtel in August 2010.