Kenneth Goldsmith: Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020)

22 June 2020, dusan

“In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard.

In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other “shadow libraries” and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb’s commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today’s gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.”

Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 2020
ISBN 9780231186940, 0231186940
x+318 pages

Reviews: Raphael Rubinstein (Art in America, 2020), Jan Baetens (Leonardo, 2020), Mark Athitakis (On the Seawall, 2020), Nick Soulsby (PopMatters, 2020), Alexander Adams (2020), Tomáš Hudák (3/4, 2020, SK), Cécile Marie-Castanet (Critique d’art, 2020, FR), Georg Fischer (iRights.info, 2020, DE), Gill Partington (London Review of Books, 2021), Daniel Morris (Williams Review, 2021), Andrew S. Taylor (American Book Review, 2022), Roi Tartakovsky (Common Knowledge, 2023).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML (added on 2020-6-23)
EPUB (11 MB, updated on 2020-6-24)

Richard W. Bailey (ed.): Computer Poems (1973)

14 October 2019, dusan

A collection of early computer-generated poetry gathered by Richard W. Bailey.

“At the beginning of this century, Stephane Mallarmé published a slogan for modernism: A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. Chance is not abolished by the computer’s randomizing power but is re-created in different terms. The poet-programmer finds this power a tool to create a new set of dice, multi-faceted and marked with elements of his own choosing.

Yet the new battle to free language is fought on familiar battlefields: concrete poetry is reflected with a computer mirror in the poems of Leslie Mezei and Greta Monarch; pure poetry of sound in the verbal orchestrations of Archie Donald and Noreen Greeno; imagistic poetry in the juxtaposition of the unfamiliar by Charles Forbes, James Runner, and Robin Shirley; syllabic organization in the haiku of Margaret Chisman, Robert Gaskins, and John Morris; and the imposition of order on disorder in the poems of Marie Borroff, Pete Kilgannon, and Louis Milic. From all of these varied efforts a new convention has already arisen that allows poets like Edwin Morgan the scope to simulate computer poetry without recourse to the machine.

The Potagannissing Press takes pleasure in the publication of the following collection of poems, an edition of computer-assisted literary works executed in Britain, Canada, and the United States.

The occasion for its publication was a symposium on the computer in the arts held at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in May 1973, an event sponsored by the Academy, the Bloomfield Art Association, Eastern Michigan University, and the University of Michigan, with the support of the Michigan Council for the Arts.” (from the preface)

Publisher Potagannissing Press, Drummond Island, MI, 1973
53 pages
via xfoml

Commentary: Matteo D’Ambrosio (Matlit, 2018).

WorldCat

PDF (7 MB, page warble is due to the book copy’s poor condition)
Internet Archive

Between Poetry and Painting (1965)

26 October 2018, dusan

The catalogue for Between Poetry and Painting, an exhibition that was curated by Jasia Reichardt and held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 22 October 1965 to 27 November 1965. The purview is work at the confluence of poetry and painting, with a particular emphasis on visual poetry and adjacent forms.

Exhibiting artists include: Pierre Albert-Birot, Nanni Balestrini, Thomas Bayrle/Bernhard Jäger, Claus Bremer, Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Kenelm Cox, Klaus-Peter Dienst, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Reinhard Döhl, Tom Edmonds, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Barry Flanagan, John Furnival, Heinz Gappmayr, Pierre Garnier, PA Gette, Eugen Gomringer, Raoul Hausmann, Bernard Heidsieck, Joseph Hirsal, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ernst Jandl, Thomas Kabdebo, Jiří Kolář, Ferdinand Kriwet, John Latham, Roberto Altmann, Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, Gio Minola, Roland Sabatier, Jacques Spacagna, Hansjörg Mayer, Franz Mon, Edwin Morgan, Ronaldo Azeredo, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Pedro Xisto, Ladislav Novák, Antonio Porta/Romano Ragazzi, Josua Reichert, Dieter Rot, Gerhard Rühm, John Sharkey and Hans Staudacher.

Edited by Jasia Reichardt
Publisher Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1965
81 pages
via James Ryan (xfoml)

PDF (17 MB)
Internet Archive