january-2012

On the
up
Introducing a new
generation of hotshots
from Dutch ‘school of
cool’, Design Academy
Eindhoven
WORDS: ANNEMARIE HOEVE
PHOTOGRAPHY: FULCO SMIT ROETERS
Who: KYRA VAN INEVELD,
THE NETHERLANDS (BA)
What: Tracking ‘the truth’
in Wikipedia
DESIGN UP
“My project is about
the transitory nature of
information. Fifty years
ago, everyone had an
encyclopedia at home.
You didn’t think about
what was ‘true’. With
Wikipedia, the wisdom
of the crowd ensures
that ‘the truth’ changes
every second. We’ve
become continuous
curators of our own
reality. To illustrate this,
I chose the five biggest
topics on Wikipedia
that have changed
the most. I printed
out all of the pages,
including the edits, and
bound them into five
new encyclopedias.
The documents were
so big, my computer
crashed and my printer
was on day and night
for two full weeks.
The topics are: Barack
Obama (2,706 pages),
the Catholic Church
(2,602 pages), the war
in Gaza (2,289 pages),
Global Warming (2,168
pages) and ‘Race and
Intelligence’ (1,876
pages). The contributor
lists alone contain
thousands of names.
I sometimes wish that
we could go back to the
past, when you could
depend on the word of
a handful of ‘experts’.”
Holland Herald 39