Print Wikipedia, an effort to envision all of English-language Wikipedia as an old-fashioned dead-tree reference set, reached its conclusion just before 10 p.m. on Sunday when a handful of people gathered at a Lower East Side art gallery to watch the last of 7,600 volumes upload to the print-on-demand Web site Lulu.com — exactly 24 days, 3 hours and 18 minutes after the process began.

The crowd may have been modest, especially when measured against Wikipedia’s nearly 7.5 million named contributors, each of whom is listed in the 36-volume contributors index. But Michael Mandiberg, the interdisciplinary artist who spent much of the past three years preparing for the project, described the mood as celebratory nonetheless.

“I popped a bottle of champagne,” he said by telephone on Monday. “We were just really happy and exhausted and relieved.”

The project, which was showcased at Denny Gallery in an exhibition titled “From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!,” does not actually involve printing all 7,600 volumes, but envisioning what a printed version would look like, and how big it would be.

At the gallery, that meant combining a minimalist-chic aesthetic with high-nerd performance art. Most of the gallery’s walls were covered with black-and-white wallpaper showing the spines of the first 1,980 volumes (each of which runs to about 700 pages), supplemented by 106 physical volumes on translucent shelves. The Print Wikipedia page at Lulu.com was projected on a lone blank wall, allowing visitors to track the upload in progress.