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

“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)

Brandon LaBelle, Christof Migone (eds.): Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (2001)

“Writing Aloud is an anthology focusing on the relationship of language to sound, writing to music, and brings together a highly diverse collection of essays, interviews, meditations, visual projects, text-sound scores and audio by some of the leading individuals in the field of cultural and performance studies, experimental music and contemporary art.

Starting from the perspective that the sound of the voice is crucial to our perceptions and understandings of language, to the creative possibility of being without language, Writing Aloud examines the repercussions of such a perspective. Considering the sonics of words, it extends this examination of vocalization and articulation into how it contributes to and influences communication and notions of self-recognition. And further, how orality effects the act of writing itself, stages the tension between sense and non-sense, and provides space for self-reflection.

Through cultural, historical, linguistic, musical and artistic histories and practices, this field of research is addressed in order to open up a diversity of attitudes and approaches toward a broader understanding of what it means to speak. Such works as Nicholas Zurbrugg’s detailed examination of the history of sound-poetry, which underscores this often under-represented field as being a vital link between the avant-gardes of modernism and contemporary culture; Sean Cubitt’s meditation on the voice in relation to contemporary technologies; and Fred Moten’s examination of the Black avant-garde through the works of Billy Strayhorn, Delaney, and Antonin Artaud in relation to deeper questions of identity – these original works advance our understanding of ‘vocalization’ as existing within a complex and highly charged social, political and cultural arena where identity is a contested site.

In conjunction with these analytical works, Writing Aloud also provides readers with some valuable reconsiderations and reproductions of historical work, such as Marina Abramovic’s performance from 1975, Freeing the Voice, in which the artist exhales every breath as a scream for one hour; plus a revealing and insightful interview with the composer Alvin Lucier, whose compositions from the 60s to today continue to challenge and astound listeners; a valuable document of a long lost French artist, Arthur Petronio, whose recordings from the mid-60s, Verbophonie, trace a highly personal and idiosyncratic terrain of voice and electronics; and important visual and audio documentation of an early installation, Body Building, by the artist Vito Acconci. Through such a range of contributions Writing Aloud suggests links between disparate practices and stimulates conversations between disciplines, one which follows the line where text and sound meet, speaking and music collide, and theory and writing converse.

Also included in the anthology are GX Jupitter-Larsen, Terri Kapsalis, Norie Neumark, Kim Dawn, Alexandre St-Onge, Jocelyn Robert, Robert Ashley, Achim Wollscheid, Bart Plantenga, Vincent Barras, Michel Chion, John Duncan, and others.”

Publisher Errant Bodies, Los Angeles, 2001
ISBN 9780965557030, 0965557030
279 pages
via cmigone

Reviews: Christopher DeLaurenti (The Tentacle, 2001), Jim Drobnick (Parachute, 2002), John Dack (Computer Music Journal, 2003).

Publisher
Editor
WorldCat

PDF (37 MB)

Henri Chopin: Poésie sonore internationale (1979) [French]

“This is a (now) historical appraisal of Poésie sonore (Sound Poetry) by Henri Chopin, a central figure in the art form. The sonic qualities of voice and abstract sound was celebrated where poets from across the globe contributed to this phenomenal shift from the purely literal expression of text and voice. Chopin references key artists in the movement, significant works and examples of what were also often visually arresting artworks where wit, design and seriality are evident in typewriter art, collage, text art.”

The book is in French with the exception of the Introduction which is translated into English and the English section ‘A History of Recorded Sound’ (pp 13-40).

With an Introduction by William Burroughs
Publisher J.-M. Place, Paris, 1979
Trajectoires series, 1
ISBN 2858930325, 9782858930326
309 pages

WorldCat

PDF (63 MB)
MP3 (ZIP) (2 accompanying cassettes, 161 MB, via David, added on 2019-1-26)
MP3 (first of the two accompanying cassettes, via UbuWeb, added on 2019-1-22)