The World Wide Web began to show up by snail mail at the end of May. It arrived on sheets of office paper, stacked in white boxes, slipped into bubble-wrapped manila sleeves, folded into a clean, white business envelope with Rosa Parks stamps, stuffed in neon-green packaging from Farmington Hills, Michigan. As of this week, 10 tons of pages from the Internet have accumulated at an art gallery in Mexico City, sent by more than 600 people who bothered to print out portions of the Web and postmark them.
To give some sense of scope: 10 tons is roughly equivalent to the combined weight of three or four baby Blue whales. It's a lot of paper. Yet it's not even a sliver of the whole Internet.
"There's very little pornography, and I'm really surprised by that," says Pamela Echeverría, founder and director of Labor, the art gallery hosting the exhibit. "I thought, 'Oh, my god, we're going to receive really nasty pictures.' So far, it hasn't happened."