This text was originally published in [The
Funambulist](https://thefunambulist.net/) - Issue 17, May-June 2018
"Weaponized Infrastructure".
__
In 2003 artist Jackie Summell started a correspondence with Herman Wallace,
who at the time was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement in the
Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, by asking him “What kind of a house
does a man who has lived in a 6′ x 9′ cell for over thirty years dream of?”
(1) The Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in
the US, besides inmate quarters and among other facilities includes a prison
plantation, Prison View Golf Course, and Angola Airstrip. The nickname Angola
comes from the former slave plantation purchased for a prison after the end of
the Civil War – and where Herman Wallace became a prisoner in 1971 upon
charges of armed robbery. He became politically active in the prison's chapter
of the Black Panther and campaigned for better conditions in Angola,
organizing petitions and hunger strikes against segregation, rape, and
violence. In 1973, together with Albert Woodfox, he was convicted of murder of
a prison guard and both were put in solitary confinement. Together with Robert
King, Wallace and Woodfox would become known as the Angola 3, the three prison
inmates who served the longest period in solitary confinement – 29, 41, and 43
years respectively. The House that Herman Built, Herman's virtual and
eventually physical dream house in his birth city of New Orleans grew from the
correspondence between Jackie and Herman. At one point, Jackie asked Herman to
make a list of the books he would have on the book shelf in his dream house,
the books which influenced his political awakening. At the time Jackie was a
fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, which supported acquisition
of the books and became the foundation of Herman's physical library on its
premises, waiting for his dream home to be built to relocate.
In 2013 the conviction against Herman Wallace was thrown out and he was
released from jail. Three days later he passed away. He never saw his dream
house built, nor took a book from a shelf in his library in Solitude, which
remained accessible to fellows and visitors until 2014. In 2014 Public
Library/Memory of the World (2) digitized Herman's library to place it online
thus making it permanently accessible to everyone with an Internet
connection(3). The spirit of Herman Wallace continued to live through the
collection shaping him – works by Marxists, revolutionaries, anarchists,
abolitionists, and civil rights activists, some of whom were also prisoners
during their lifetime. Many books from Herman's library would not be
accessible to those serving time, as access to knowledge for the inmate
population in the US is increasingly being regulated. A peak into the list of
banned books, which at one point included Michelle Alexander's The New Jim
Crow (The New Press, 2010), reveals the incentive of the ban was to prevent
access to knowledge that would allow inmates to understand their position in
society and the workings of the prison-industrial complex. It is becoming
increasingly difficult for inmates to have chance encounters with a book that
could change their lives; given access to knowledge they could see their
position in life from another perspective; they could have a moment of
revelation like the one Cle Sloan had. Sloan, a member of the Los Angeles gang
Bloods encountered his neighborhood Athens Park on a 1972 Los Angeles Police
Department 'Gang Territories' map in Mike Davis' book City of Quartz, which
made him understand gang violence in L.A. was a product of institutional
violence, structural racism, and systemic dispersal of community support
networks put in place by the Black Panther Party.
The books in Herman's library can be seen as a toolbox of “really useful
knowledge” for someone who has to conceive the notion of freedom. The term
“really useful knowledge” originated with workers' awareness of the need for
self-education in the early-19th century, describing a body of 'unpractical'
knowledge such as politics, economics, and philosophy, workers needed to
understand and change their position in society, and opposed 'useful
knowledge' – knowledge of 'practical' skills which would make them useful to
the employer. Like in the 19th century, sustaining the system relies on
continued exploitation of a population prevented from accessing, producing and
sharing knowledges needed to start to understand the system that is made to
oppress and to articulate a position from which they can act. Who controls the
networks of production and distribution to knowledge is an important issue, as
it determines which books are made accessible. Self-help and coloring books
are allowed and accessible to inmates so as to continue oppression and pacify
resistance. The crisis of access persists outside the prison walls with a
continuous decline in the number of public libraries and the books they offer
due to the double assault of austerity measures and a growing monopoly of the
corporate publishing industry.
Digital networks have incredible power to widely distribute content, and once
the (digital) content is out there it is relatively easy to share and access.
Digital networks can provide a solution for enclosure of knowledge and for the
oppressed, easier access to channels of distribution. At least that was the
promise – the Internet would enable a democratization of access. However,
digital networks have a significant capacity to centralize and control within
the realm of knowledge distribution, one look at the oligopoly of academic
publishing and its impact on access and independent production shows its
contrary.
In June 2015 Elsiver won an injunction against Library Genesis and its
subsidiary platform sci-hub.org, making it inaccessible in some countries and
via some commercial internet providers. Run by anonymous scientists mostly
from Eastern Europe, these voluntary and non-commercial projects are the
largest illegal repository of electronic books, journals, and articles on the
web (4). Most of the scientific articles collected in the repository bypassed
the paywalls of academic publishers using the solidary network of access
provided by those associated with universities rich enough to pay the
exuberant subscription fees. The only person named in the court case was
Alexandra Elbakyan, who revealed her identity as the creator of sci-hub.org,
and explained she was motivated by the lack of access: “When I was working on
my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work
were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university
was not subscribed to anything.”(5) The creation of sci-hub.org made
scientific knowledge accessible to anyone, not just to members of wealthy
academic institutions. The act of acknowledging responsibility for sci-hub
transformed what was seen as the act of illegality (piracy) into the act of
civil disobedience. In the context of sci-hub and Library Genesis, both
projects from the periphery of knowledge production, “copyright infringement
opens on to larger questions about the legitimacy of the historic compromise –
if indeed there ever even was one – between the labor that produces culture
and knowledge and its commodification as codified in existing copyright
regulations.”(6) Here, disobedience and piracy have an equalizing effect on
the asymmetries of access to knowledge.
In 2008, programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz published Guerilla Open
Access Manifesto triggered by the enclosure of scientific knowledge production
of the past, often already part of public domain, via digitization. “The
world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in
books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful
private corporations […] We need to download scientific journals and upload
them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”(7)
On January 6, 2011, the MIT police and the US Secret Service arrested Aaron
Swartz on charges of having downloaded a large number of scientific articles
from one of the most used and paywalled database. The federal prosecution
decided to show the increasingly nervous publishing industry the lengths they
are willing to go to protect them by indicting Swartz on 13 criminal counts.
With a threat of 50 years in prison and US$1 million fine, Aaron committed
suicide on January 11, 2013. But he left us with an assignment – if you have
access, you have a responsibility to share with those who do not; “with enough
of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join
us?” (8) He pointed to an important issue – every new cycle of technological
development (in this case the move from paper to digital) brings a new threat
of enclosure of the knowledge in the public domain.
While “the core and the periphery adopt different strategies of opposition to
the inequalities and exclusions [digital] technologies start to reproduce”
some technologies used by corporations to enclose can be used to liberate
knowledge and make it accessible. The existence of projects such as Library
Genesis, sci-hub, Public Library/Memory of the World, aaaarg.org, monoskop,
and ubuweb, commonly known as shadow libraries, show how building
infrastructure for storing, indexing, and access, as well as supporting
digitization, can not only be put to use by the periphery, but used as a
challenge to the normalization of enclosure offered by the core. The people
building alternative networks of distribution also build networks of support
and solidarity. Those on the peripheries need to 'steal' the knowledge behind
paywalls in order to fight the asymmetries paywalls enforce – peripheries
“steal” in order to advance. Depending on the vantage point, digitization of a
book can be stealing, or liberating it to return the knowledge (from the dusty
library closed stacks) back into circulation. “Old” knowledge can teach new
tricksters a handful of tricks.
In 2015 I realized none of the architecture students of the major European
architecture schools can have a chance encounter with Architecture and
Feminisms or Sexuality and Space, nor with many books on similar topics
because they were typically located in the library’s closed stacks. Both books
were formative and in 2005, as a student I went to great lengths to gain
access to them. The library at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, was
starved of books due to permanent financial crisis, and even bestsellers such
as Rem Koolhaas' S, M, L, XL were not available, let alone books that were
focused on feminism and architecture. At the time, the Internet could inform
that edited volumes such as Architecture and Feminism and Sexuality and Space
existed but nothing more. To satisfy my curiosity, and help me write a paper,
a friend sent – via another friend – her copies from London to Belgrade, which
I photocopied, and returned. With time, I graduated to buying my own second
hand copies of both books, which I digitized upon realizing access to them
still relied on access to a well-stocked specialist library. They became the
basis for my growing collection on feminism/gender/space I maintain as an
amateur librarian, tactically digitizing books to contribute to the growing
struggle to make architecture more equitable as both a profession and an
effect in space.
At the end, a confession, and an anecdote – since 2015, I have tried to
digitize a book a week and every year, I manage to digitize around 20 books,
so one can say I am not particularly good at meeting my goals. The books I do
digitize are related to feminism, space, race, urban riots, and struggle, and
I choose them for their (un)availability and urgency. Most of them are
published in the 1970s and 1980s, though some were published in the 1960s and
1990s. Some I bought as former library books, digitized on a DIY book scanner,
and uploaded to the usual digital repositories. It takes two to four hours to
make a neat and searchable PDF scan of a book. As a PDF, knowledge production
usually under the radar or long out of print becomes more accessible. One of
the first books I digitized was Robert Goodman's After the Planners, a
critique of urban planning and the limits of alternate initiatives in cities
written in the late 1960s. A few years after I scanned it, online photos from
a conference drew my attention –the important, white male professor was
showing the front page of After the Planners on his slide. I realized fast the
image had a light signature of the scanner I had used. While I do not know if
this act of digitization made a dent or was co-opted, seeing the image was a
small proof that digitization can bring books back into circulation and access
to them might make a difference – or that access to knowledge can be a weapon.
[Dubravka Sekulic](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/sekulic/) writes
about the production of space. She is an amateur-librarian at Public
Library/Memory of the World, where she maintains feminist, and space/race
collections. During Making Futures School, Dubravka will be figuring out the
future of education (on all things spatial) together with [Elise
Hunchuck](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/hunchuck/), [Jonathan
Solomon](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/solomon/) and [Valentina
Karga](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/karga/).
__
This text was originally published in The Funambulist - Issue 17, May-June
2018 "Weaponized Infrastrucuture". [A pdf version of it can be downloaded
here.](https://www.making-futures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05
/Dubravka_Sekulic-On_Knowledge_and_Stealing.pdf)
__
Notes:
(1) For more on the project Herman’s House. Accessed 6 April 2018.
(2) Public Library is a project which has been since 2012 developing and
publicly supporting scenarios for massive disobedience against the current
regulation of production and circulation of knowlde and culture in the digital
realm. See: ‘Memory of the World’. Accessed 7 April 2018.
(3) Herman's library can be accessed at[
http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/](http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/) More
on the context of digitization see: ‘Herman’s Library’. Memory of the World
(blog), 28 October 2014.
/hermans-library/>, and ‘Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production’. Memory of the World (blog), 30 October 2014.
the-infrastructures-of-knowledge-production/.>
(4) For more on shadow libraries and library genesis see: Bodo, Balazs.
‘Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY:
Social Science Research Network, 10 June 2015.
(5) ‘Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s “Illegal” Copyright Paywalls’. TorrentFreak
(blog), 27 June 2015.
illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/.>
(6) For the schizophrenia of the current model of the corporate enclosure of
the scientific knowledge see: Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of
a Takedown, forthcoming, 2018
(7) Aaron Swartz. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Accessed 7 April 2018.[
http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.](http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.)
(8) Ibid.
(9) Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of a Takedown, forthcoming,
2018.
(10) See ‘In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’.
http://custodians.online. Accessed 7 April 2018.
Goldsmith
UbuWeb at 15 Years An Overview
2011
# UbuWeb at 15 Years: An Overview
By [Kenneth Goldsmith](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kenneth-
goldsmith)
It's amazing to me that [UbuWeb](http://ubu.com), after fifteen years, is
still going. Run with no money and put together pretty much without
permission, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things
the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde,
but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the
end, we're giving to all. UbuWeb is as much about the legal and social
ramifications of its self-created distribution and
[archiving](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/archiving-is-the-
new-folk-art/) system as it is about the content hosted on the site. In a
sense, the content takes care of itself; but keeping it up there has proved to
be a trickier proposition. The socio-political maintenance of keeping free
server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered
with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright
infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we're still going
strong. We're lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket
bandwidth, we've consented to be objects of university research in the
ideology and practice of radical distribution.
But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating
on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely
definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to
be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP
pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of
it. Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We
don't touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the
site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—[the music of
Jean Dubuffet](http://www.ubu.com/sound/dubuffet.html), [the poetry of Dan
Graham](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/poem.html),[ Julian Schnabel’s
country music](http://ubu.com/sound/schnabel.html), [the punk rock of Martin
Kippenberger](http://ubu.com/sound/kippenberger.html), [the diaries of John
Lennon](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen7/diary.html), [the rants of Karen
Finley](http://www.ubu.com/sound/uproar.html), and [pop songs by Joseph
Beuys](http://www.ubu.com/film/beuys_sonne.html)—all of which was originally
put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly.
However the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video,
sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say,
painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art
history, one based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on
the perceived, or market-based, center. Few people, for example, know that
Richard Serra makes videos. Whilst visiting his recent retrospective at The
Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was no sign of [TELEVISION DELIVERS
PEOPLE](http://www.ubu.com/film/serra_television.html) (1973) or
[BOOMERANG](http://www.ubu.com/film/serra_boomerang.html) (1974), both being
well-visited resources on UbuWeb. Similarly, Salvador Dali’s obscure video,
[IMPRESSIONS DE LA HAUTE MONGOLIE—HOMMAGE Á RAYMOND
ROUSSEL](http://www.ubu.com/film/dali_impressions.html) from the mid-70s can
be viewed. Outside of UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), it’s the only other film he
completed in his lifetime. While you won’t find reproductions of Dali’s
paintings on UbuWeb, you will find [a 1967 recording of an advertisement he
made for a bank.](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/dali_salvador/Dali-
Salvador_Apoth-du-dollar_1967.mp3)
It’s not all off-beat: there is, in all fairness, lots of primary expressions
of artists’ works which port to the web perfectly: [the films of Hollis
Frampton](http://ubu.com/film/frampton.html), [readings by Alain Robbe-
Grillet](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/audio5B.html#jealousy), [Samuel
Beckett radio plays](http://www.ubu.com/sound/beckett.html), [the concrete
poems of Mary Ellen Solt](http://ubu.com/historical/solt/index.html), [the
writings of Maurice Blanchot](http://ubu.com/ubu/blanchot_last_man.html) and
the [music of Meredith Monk](http://www.ubu.com/sound/monk.html), to name a
few.
UbuWeb began in 1996 as a site focusing on visual and concrete poetry. With
the advent of the graphical web browser, we began scanning old concrete poems,
astonished by how fresh they looked backlit by the computer screen. Shortly
thereafter, when streaming audio became available, it made sense to extend our
scope to sound poetry, and as bandwidth increased we later added MP3s as well
as video. Sound poetry opened up a whole new terrain: certain of [John Cage’s
readings](http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html) of his mesostic texts could be
termed “sound poetry,” hence we included them. As often, though, Cage combined
his readings with an orchestral piece; we included those as well. But soon, we
found ourselves unable to distinguish the difference between “sound poetry”
and “music.” We encountered this dilemma time and again whether it was with
the compositions of [Maurico Kagel](http://www.ubu.com/sound/kagel.html),
[Joan La Barbara](http://www.ubu.com/sound/lab.html), or [Henri
Chopin](http://www.ubu.com/sound/chopin.html), all of whom are as well-known
as composers as they are sound artists. After a while, we gave up trying to
name things; we dropped the term “sound poetry” and referred to it thenceforth
simply as “[Sound](http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html).”
When we began posting [found street
poems](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/ass.html) that used letter forms in
fantastically innovative ways, we had to reconsider what “concrete poetry”
was. As time went on, we seemed to be outgrowing our original taxonomies until
we simply became a repository for the “avant-garde” (whatever that means—our
idea of what is “avant-garde” seems to be changing all the time). UbuWeb
adheres to no one historical narrative, rather we’re more interested in
putting several disciplines into the same space and seeing how they interact:
poetry, music, film, and literature from all periods encounter and bounce off
of each other in unexpected ways.
In 2005, we acquired a collection called [The 365 Days
Project](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/index.shtml), a year’s worth of
outrageous MP3s that can be best described as celebrity gaffs, recordings of
children screeching, how-to records, song-poems, propagandistic religious
ditties, spoken word pieces, even ventriloquist acts. However, buried deep
within The 365 Days Project were rare tracks by the legendary avant-gardist
[Nicolas Slonimsky](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/070.shtml), an
early-to-mid-twentieth century conductor, performer, and composer belting out
advertisements and children’s ditties on the piano in an off-key voice. UbuWeb
had already been hosting historical recordings from the 1920s he
[conducted](http://www.ubu.com/sound/slonimsky.html) of [Charles
Ives](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/slonimsky_nicolas/Slonimsky-
Nicolas_02_Ives-Barn-Dance.mp3), [Carl
Ruggles](http://www.ubu.com/sound/agp/AGP167.html), and [Edgard
Varèse](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/slonimsky_nicolas/Slonimsky-
Nicolas_01_Varese-Ionisation.mp3) in our Sound section, yet nestled in amongst
oddballs like [Louis Farrakhan singing
calypso](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/091.shtml) or high school
choir’s renditions of “[Fox On The
Run](http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2003/01/365-Days-Project-01-04-dondero-high-
school-a-capella-choir-fox-on-the-run-1996.mp3),” Slonimsky fit into both
categories—high and low—equally well.
A few years back, Jerome Rothenberg, the leading scholar of
[Ethnopoetics](http://ubu.com/ethno/), approached us with an idea to include a
wing which would feature Ethnopoetic sound, visual art, poetry, and essays.
Rothenberg’s interest was specific to UbuWeb: how the avant-garde dovetailed
with the world’s deep cultures—those surviving in situ as well as those that
had vanished except for transcriptions in books or recordings from earlier
decades. Sound offerings include everything from [Slim
Gaillard](http://ubu.com/ethno/soundings/gaillard.html) to [Inuit throat
singing](http://ubu.com/ethno/soundings/inuit.html), each making formal
connections to modernist strains of [Dada](http://www.ubu.com/sound/dada.html)
or [sound poetry](http://ubu.com/sound/poesia_sonora.html). Likewise, the
Ethnopoetic visual poetry section ranges from [Chippewa song
pictures](http://ubu.com/ethno/visuals/chip.html) to [Paleolithic
palimpsests](http://ubu.com/ethno/visuals/paleo.html) to [Apollinaire’s
Calligrammes](http://ubu.com/historical/app/index.html) (1912–18) There are
dozens of papers with topics like “[Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of
Scat](http://ubu.com/ethno/discourses/syntax_of_scat.doc)” to [Kenneth
Rexroth’s writings on American Indian
song](http://ubu.com/ethno/discourses/rexroth_indian.html).
There are over 2500 full-length avant-garde films and videos, both streaming
and downloadable, including the videos of [Vito
Acconci](http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html) and the filmic oeuvre of [Jack
Smith](http://www.ubu.com/film/smith_jack.html), You can also find several
biographies and interviews with authors such as [Jorge Luis
Borges](http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html),[ J. G.
Ballard](http://www.ubu.com/film/ballard.html), [Allen
Ginsberg](http://www.ubu.com/film/ginsberg.html), and [Louis-Ferdinand
Céline](http://www.ubu.com/film/celine.html). And there are a number of films
about avant-garde music, most notably [Robert
Ashley](http://www.ubu.com/sound/ashley.html)’s epic 14-hour [Music with Roots
in the Aether](http://www.ubu.com/film/aether.html), a series of composer
portraits made in the mid-70s featuring artists such as [Pauline
Oliveros](http://www.ubu.com/film/oliveros.html), [Philip
Glass](http://www.ubu.com/film/glass_aether.html), and [Alvin
Lucier](http://www.ubu.com/film/aether.html). A dozen of the rarely screened
films by [Mauricio Kagel](http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html) can be viewed as
can [Her Noise](http://www.ubu.com/film/her_noise.html), a documentary about
women and experimental music from 2005. There are also hours of performance
documentation, notably the entire [Cinema of
Transgression](http://www.ubu.com/film/transgression.html) series with films
by [Beth B](http://www.ubu.com/film/b.html) and [Richard
Kern](http://www.ubu.com/film/kern.html), a lecture by [Chris
Burden](http://www.ubu.com/film/burden.html), a bootleg version of [Robert
Smithson’s HOTEL PALENQUE](http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson.html), (1969) and
an astonishing [21-minute clip of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte
fish](http://www.ubu.com/film/hoffman.html) on Christmas Eve of 1973.
Other portions of the site include a vast repository of papers about audio,
performance, conceptual art, and poetry. There are large sections of artists
simply placed together under categories of Historical and Contemporary. And
then there is [/ubu Editions](http://www.ubu.com/ubu/), which offers full-
length PDFs of literature and poetry. Among the 73 titles, authors include Tim
Davis, Ron Silliman, Maurice Blanchot, Caroline Bergvall, Claude Simon, Jeremy
Sigler, Severo Sarduy, and Juliana Spahr. And finally there is a [Conceptual
Writing](http://ubu.com/concept/index.html) wing which highlights contemporary
trends in poetry as well as its historical precedents.
How does it all work? Most importantly, UbuWeb functions on no money: all work
is done by volunteers. Our server space and bandwidth is donated by several
universities, who use UbuWeb as an object of study for ideas related to
radical distribution and gift economies on the web. In terms of content, each
section has an editor who brings to the site their area of expertise. Ubu is
constantly being updated but the mission is different from the flotsam and
jetsam of a blog; rather, we liken it to a library which is ever-expanding in
uncanny—and often uncategorizable—directions. Fifteen years into it, UbuWeb
hosts over 7,500 artists and several thousand works of art. You’ll never find
an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. UbuWeb has always been and will
always be free and open to all.
The future is eminently scalable: as long as we have the bandwidth and server
space, there is no limit as to how big the site can grow. For the moment, we
have no competition, a fact we’re not happy about. We’re distressed that there
is only one UbuWeb: why aren’t there dozens like it? Looking at the art world,
the problem appears to be a combination of an adherence to an old economy (one
that is working very well with a booming market) and sense of trepidation,
particularly in academic circles, where work on the internet is often not
considered valid for academic credit. As long as the art world continues to
prize economies of scarcity over those based on plentitude, the change will be
a long time coming. But UbuWeb seeks to offer an alternative by invoking a
gift economy of plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education. We’re
on numerous syllabi, ranging from kindergarteners studying pattern poetry to
post graduates listening to hours of Jacques Lacan’s
[Séminaires](http://www.ubu.com/sound/lacan.html).
And yet . . . it could vanish any day. Beggars can’t be choosers and we gladly
take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or
on the swiftest of machines; hacks and crashes eat into the archive on a
periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; occasionally
the army of volunteers dwindles to a team of one. But that’s the beauty of it:
UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to
demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment,
allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise our audience .
. . and even ourselves.
Originally Published: April 26th, 2011
Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and
beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by _Publishers Weekly._
Goldsmith is the author of eight books of poetry, founding editor of the
online archive UbuWeb (http://ubu.com), and the editor _I 'll Be Your Mirror:
The Selected Andy Warhol..._