Like the air we breathe and the water we drink, we take Wikipedia for granted. But if there’s anyone we can count on to change that, it’s Annie Rauwerda. The admin behind the Depths of Wikipedia Instagram page – who, according to her Wikipedia page, is also famous for a perpetual stew and has adopted one of Caroline Calloway’s cats – started doing live shows in 2021. The most fun you can imagine having with a slideshow of screenshots, the live show emphasises just how well Wikipedia’s ‘Table of contents’ works as a joke format. (See: “Wingdings”, “Wingdings 2”, “Wingdings 3”, “Controversy: 9/11”).
Mining comedy from the juxtaposition of encyclopedic tone and silly shit (e.g. a fish photo captioned “Boops boops in a bucket”), Rauwerda poses existential questions like, “If the ‘Ship of Theseus’ article has been edited thousands of times, is it still the same article?” Or, “Why does this photo of Vienna bread have radial motion blur?”
Where the show transcends the Instagram is Rauwerda’s celebration of the humans behind Wikipedia: writers, editors, jokesters, the people who change “is” to “was” on a public figure’s page when they die (which in the case of Henry Kissinger, Rauwerda remarks, “must feel almost as good as killing him”). Yet Rauwerda’s penchant for humanism can lack a little bite. Save for mentioning how the article on ‘U.S. involvement in regime change’ is ”too long to read and navigate comfortably”, and passing remarks on AI being trained on human-written Wikipedia articles, the show skates around engaging with the politics of information and censorship that the commons, like Wikipedia, give us a chance to claim back. Nevertheless: who could say no to a joyful hour of following internet rabbit holes?
Depths of Wikipedia, Underbelly Bristo Square, until 30 Aug (not 18), 12pm