ubuweb in Adema 2009
eth_Goldsmith "Kenneth Goldsmith")
and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound
poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its
parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As
[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb) states, Ubu is non-commercial
and operates on a gift economy. All the same - by forming an amazing resource
and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these
works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however:
‘ _should something return to print, we will remove it from our site
immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb
without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of
the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and
displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from
existing artists on site_.’
Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and
pop music the [Piratebay](http://thepiratebay.org/) and other download sites
(or p2p networks) like [Mininova](http://www.mininova.org/) are being sued and
charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a
blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer
digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from
ubuweb in Barok 2018
2018
_A talk given at the [Shadow Libraries](http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2096/)
symposium held at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in
[Athens](/Athens "Athens"), 17 March 2018. Moderated by [Kenneth
Goldsmith](/Kenneth_Goldsmith "Kenneth Goldsmith") (UbuWeb) and bringing
together [Dusan Barok](/Dusan_Barok "Dusan Barok") (Monoskop), [Marcell
Mars](/Marcell_Mars "Marcell Mars") (Public Library), [Peter
Sunde](/Peter_Sunde "Peter Sunde") (The Pirate Bay), [Vicki
Bennett](/Vicki_Bennett "Vicki Bennett") (People Like Us), [Cornelia
Sollfrank](/Cornelia_Sollfrank "Cornelia Sollfrank") (Giving What You Don't
Have), and Prodromos Tsiavos, the event was part of the _[Shadow Libraries:
UbuWeb in Athens](http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2018/) _programme organised by [Ilan
Manouach](/Ilan_Manouach "Ilan Manouach"), Kenneth Goldsmith and the Onassis
Foundation._
[](/File:Shadow_Libraries.jpg)
This is the first time that I was asked to talk about Monoskop as a _shadow
library_.
What are shadow libraries?
[Lawrence Liang](/Lawrence_Liang "Lawrence Liang") wrote a think piece for _e-
flux_ a couple of years ago,
in response to the closure of Library.nu, a digital library that had operated
from 2004, first as Ebooksclub, later as Gigapedia.
He wrote that:
[ in
response to scientific journal articles that were prohibitively expensive for
scholars based outside of Western academic institutions. (See
approach to the same issues: “When everyone is librarian, library is
everywhere.”) The repository, growing to more than 60 millions papers, was
sued in 2015 by Elsevier for $15 million, resulting in a permanent injunction.
Library Genesis, another library of comparable scale, finds itself in a
similar legal predicament.
Arguably one of the largest digital archives of the “avant-garde” (loosely
defined), UbuWeb is transparent about this fragility. In 2011, its founder
[Kenneth Goldsmith wrote](http://www.ubu.com/resources/): “by the time you
read this, UbuWeb may be gone. […] 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.” Even the banality of
exhaustion is a real risk to these libraries.
The simple fact is that some of these libraries are among the largest in the
world yet are subject to sudden disappearance. We can only begin to guess at
what the contours of “Lost Memory: Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the
Twenty-First Century” will be when it is written ninety years from now.
## Non-profit, non-state archives
Cultural and social movements have produced histories which are only partly
represented in state l
age of distribution
Different people have different technical resources and capabilities, but
everyone can contribute to an archive. By simply running the Dat Library
software and adding an archive to it, a person is sharing their disk space and
internet bandwidth in the service of that archive. At first, it is only the
archive’s index (a list of the contents) that is hosted, but if the person
downloads the contents (or even just a small portion of the contents) then
they are sharing in the hosting of the contents as well. Individuals, as
supporters of an archive or members of a community, can organise together to
guarantee the durability and accessibility of an archive, saving a future
UbuWeb from ever having to worry about if their ‘ISP pulling the plug’. As
supporters of many archives, as members of many communities, individuals can
use Dat Library to perform this function many times over.
On the Web, individuals are usually users or browsers — they use browsers. In
spite of the ostensible interactivity of the medium, users are kept at a
distance from the actual code, the infrastructure of a website, which is run
on a server. With a distributed protocol like Dat, applications such as
[Beaker Browser](https://beakerbrowser.com) or Dat Library eliminate the
central server, not by destroying it, but by distributing it across all of the
users. Individuals are then not _just_
ubuweb in Giorgetta, Nicoletti & Adema 2015
in History (MA) and Philosophy (MA)
(both University of Groningen) and Book and Digital Media Studies (MA) (Leiden
University). Janneke’s PhD thesis focuses on the future of the scholarly book
in the humanities. She has been conducting research for the
[OAPEN](http://project.oapen.org/index.php/about-oapen) project, and
subsequently the OAPEN foundation, from 2008 until 2013 (including research
for OAPEN-NL and DOAB). Her research for OAPEN focused on user needs and
publishing models concerning Open Access books in the Humanities and Social
Sciences.
**Davide Giorgetta & Valerio Nicoletti: Does a way out from the debate between
publishers and digital independent libraries (Monoskop Log, Ubuweb,
Aaaarg.org) exist, in terms of copyright? An alternative solution able to
solve the issue and to provide equal opportunities to everyone? Would the fear
of publishers of a possible reduction of incomes be legitimized if the access
to their digital publications was open and free?**
Janneke Adema: This is an interesting question, since for many academics this
‘way out’ (at least in so far it concerns scholarly publications) has been
envisioned in or through the open access movement and the use of Creative
Commons licenses. However, the open access movement, a rather plural and
loosely defined group of people, institutions and networks, in its more
moderate instantiations tends to distanc
ubuweb in Goldsmith 0
d there only
be one UbuWeb? You have the tools, the resources, the artwork and the
knowledge base to do it so much better than I'm doing it. I fell into this as
Ubu has grown organically (we do it because we can) and am clearly not the
best person to be representing experimental cinema. Ubu would love you to step
in and help make it better. Or, better yet, put us out of business by doing it
correctly, the way it should have been done in the first place.
Kenneth Goldsmith
UbuWeb
---|---|---|---
o validate
the existence of distributors who make these types of copies available. Ubu's
crummy files are a substitute, a thumbnail for the real thing: sitting in a
dark from with like-minded, warm bodies watching an enormous projection in a
room with a great sound system. Cinema, as you know too well, is a social
experience; Ubu pales by comparison. It will never be a substitute. But sadly,
for many -- unable to live near the urban centers where such fare is shown,
trapped by economics, geography, career, circumstance, health, family, etc. --
Ubu is the only lifeline to this kind of work. As such, we believe that we do
more good in the world than harm.
An ideal situation happened when UbuWeb was asked to participate in a
[show](http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/intermission) at the CCA in Montreal. The CCA
insisted on showing hi-res films, which they rented from distributors of
materials that Ubu hosts. We were thrilled. By having these materials
available to be seen on Ubu, it led to rental fees for the artists and income
for the distributors. It was a win-win situation. This Ubu working at its
best.
Finally, I don't really think it's good for me to join the list. I'm not well-
enough versed in your world to keep up with the high level of conversation
going on there. Nor do I wish to get into a pissing match. However, I can be
contacted [here](http://ubu.com/contact) and am happy to respond.
It think that, in the end, Ubu is a provocation to your community to go ahead
and do it right, do it better, to render Ubu obsolete. Why should there only
be one UbuWeb? You have the tools, the resources, the artwork and the
knowledge base to do it so much better than I'm doing it. I fell into this as
Ubu has grown organically (we do it because we can) and am clearly not the
best person to be representing experimental cinema. Ubu would love you to step
in and help make it better. Or, better yet, put us out of business by doing it
correctly, the way it should have been done in the first place.
Kenneth Goldsmith
UbuWeb
---|---|---|---
ubuweb in Goldsmith 2011
nteers 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..._
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
.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/ethn
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..._
ubuweb in Hamerman 2015
0 million users; the p2p music-sharing service was
shut down after a high-profile lawsuit by the RIAA in 2001.
The US Department of Justice brought charges against open access activist
_[Aaron Swartz](http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue51/editorial)_ in 2011 for
his large-scale unauthorized downloading of files from the JStor Academic
database. Swartz, who sadly committed suicide before his trial, was an
organizer for Demand Progress, a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act,
which was defeated in 2012. Swartz’s actions and the fight around SOPA
represent a benchmark in the struggle for open-access and anti-copyright
practices surrounding the digital book.
Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb and Public Library are representative cases of the
pirate library because of their explicit engagement with archival form, their
embrace of ideas of the _[digital commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Commons)_ within current left-leaning thought, and their like-minded focus on critical theory and the arts.
All of these projects lend themselves to be considered _as libraries_ ,
retooled for open digital networks.
_Aaaaaarg.org_ , started by Los Angeles based artist Sean Dockray, hosts
full-text pdfs of over 50,000 books and articles. The library is connected to a an
alternative education project called the Public School, which serves as a
platform for self-organizing lect
ation of
intellectual property law and the orientation of information networks toward
venture capital and advertising. While the pirate libraries fulfill this
dissident function as a kind of experimental provocation, their content is
audience-specific rather than universal.
_[UbuWeb](http://www.ubuweb.com/resources/index.html)_ , founded in 1996 by
conceptual artist/ writer Kenneth Goldsmith, is the largest online archive of
avant-garde art resources. Its holdings include sound, video and text-based
works dating from the historical avant-garde era to today. While many of the
sites in the “pirate library” continuum source their content through
community-based or peer-to-peer models, UbuWeb focuses on making available out
of print, obscure or difficult to access artistic media, stating that
uploading such historical artifacts doesn’t detract from the physical value of
the work; rather, it enhances it. The website’s philosophy blends the utopian
ideals of avant-garde concrete poetry with the ideals of the digital gift
economy, and it has specifically refused to accept corporate or foundation
funding or adopt a more market-oriented business model.
**Pirate Libraries vs. “The Sharing Economy”**
In pirate libraries, information users become archive builders by uploading
often-copyrighted content to shared networks.
Wit
eer
preservation](http://computationalculture.net/article/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation)_ ’
than ‘peer production,’ as the desires to share information
widely and to preserve these collections against shutdown often come into
conflict. In a _[recent piece](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ for e-flux coauthored with Lawrence Liang, Dockray accordingly
laments “the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries have to operate
somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that doesn’t allow
imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques of evasion,
distribution, and redundancy.”
UbuWeb and Monoskop, which digitize rare, out-of-print art texts and media
rather than in-print titles, can be said to fulfill the aims of preservation
and access. UbuWeb and Monoskop are openly used and discussed as classroom
resources and in online arts journalism more frequently than the more
aggressively anti-copyright sources; more on-the-record and mainstream
visibility likely -- but doesn’t necessarily -- equate to wider usage.
**From Alternative Space to Alternative Media**
Aaaaaarg _[locates itself as a
‘scaffolding’](http://chtodelat.org/b9-texts-2/vilensky/materialities-of-independent-publishing-a-conversation-with-aaaaarg-chto-delat-i-cite-mute-and-neural/)_ between institutions, a platform that unfolds between institutional
gaps and fills them in, rather than directly opposing them. Over ten years
after it was founded, it continue
creative platforms that encourage blending high-academic language with pop-
culture; quantitative analysis with art-making; appropriation with
authenticity: the pirate libraries serve just these purposes.
Pirate libraries help bring about what Gary Hall calls the “unbound book” as
text-form; as he writes, we can perceive such a digital book “as liquid and
living, open to being continually updated and collaboratively written, edited,
annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered,
reiterated and reimagined.” These projects allow us to re-imagine both
archival practices and the digital book for social networks based on the gift.
Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb, and Public Library build a record of critical and
artistic discourse that is held in common, user-responsive and networkable.
Amateur librarians sustain these projects through technological ‘hacks’ that
innovate upon present archival tools and push digital preservation practices
forward.
Pirate libraries critique the ivory tower’s monopoly over the digital book.
They posit a space where alternative communities can flourish.
Between the cracks of the new information capital, the digital text-sharing
underground fosters the coming-into-being of another kind of information
society, one in which the historical record is the democratically-shared basis
for new forms of knowledge.
ubuweb in Mars & Medak 2019
they can lower insecurities and
disobediently demand universal access to knowledge and education, a mass
intellectuality and autonomous critical pedagogy that increasingly seems a thing
of the past. Against the imposition to translate quality into metrics and capture
short-term values through assessment, they can resist the game of simulation.
While the playful simulation of reality was a thing in 1967, in 2017 it is no
longer. Libraries and universities can stop faking ‘innovativity’, ‘efficiency’ and
‘utility’.
article | 361
Custodians.online, the second letter
On 30 November, 2016 a second missive was published by Custodians.online
(2016). On the twentieth anniversary of UbuWeb, ‘the single-most important
archive of avant-garde and outsider art’ on the Internet, the drafters of the letter
followed up on their initial call to acts of care for the infrastructure of our shared
knowledge commons that the first letter ended with. The second letter was a gift
card to Ubu, announcing that it had received two mirrors, i.e. exact copies of the
Ubu website accessible from servers in two different locations – one in Iceland,
supported by a cultural activist community, and another one in Switzerland,
supported by a major art school – whose maintenance should ensure that Ubu
remains accessible even if its primary server is taken down.
McKenzie Wark in their text on UbuWeb poignantly observes that shadow
libraries are:
tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the art-world, of
publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical
and political-economic constraints of all three. As it says in the Communist
Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that question in the era of the
culture industries, they try to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic for
answering the property question in the era of the vulture industries. (Wark, 2015:
116)
As we claimed, the avant-garde radicalism can be recuperated for the present
ubuweb in Mars, Medak & Sekulic 2016
activity of public libraries is in radical contrast to the potentials for universal
access to all of culture and knowledge that
digital distribution could make possible
at a very low cost, but with considerable
change in the regulation of intellectual production in society.
Since such change would not be in the
interest of formulaic application of intellectual property, acts of civil disobedience to
that regime have over the last twenty years
created a number of 'shadow public libraries'
that provide universal access to knowledge
and culture in the digital domain in the way
that the public libraries are not allowed to:
Library Genesis, Science Hub, Aaaaarg,
Monoskop, Memory of the World or Ubuweb. They all have a simple objective – to
provide access to books, journals and digitised knowledge to all who find themselves
outside the rich academic institutions of the
West and who do not have the privilege of
institutional access.
These shadow public libraries bravely remind society of all the watershed moments in the struggles and negotiations
that have resulted in the establishment
of social institutions, so as to first enable
the transition from what was an unjust,
discriminating and exploitative to a better society, and later guarantee that these
gains would not be dismantled or rescinded. That reminder is, however, more than a
mere hacker pastime, just as the reactions
of the corp
ubuweb in Mars & Medak 2017
xtortionate
subscriptions. The Public Library project fills in the space that remains denied to
real-world public libraries by building tools for organizing and sharing electronic
libraries, creating digitization workflows and making books available online.
Obviously, we are not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms, public
and hidden, that help people to share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is a part of
a wider global movement based, amongst other influences, on the seminal work of
Aaron Swartz. This movement consists of various projects including but not
limited to Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, and others. Please situate The
Public Library project in the wider context of this movement. What are its distinct
features? What are its main contributions to the movement at large?
MM & TM: The Public Library project is informed by two historic moments in
the development of institution of public library The first defining moment
happened during the French Revolution – the seizure of library collections from
aristocracy and clergy, and their transfer to the Bibliothèque Nationale and
municipal libraries of the post-revolutionary Republic. The second defining
moment happened in England through working class struggles to make knowledge
accessible to the working class. After the revolution
ubuweb in Medak, Mars & WHW 2015
s
Tomislav Medak • Marcell Mars •
What, How & for Whom / WHW
ISBN 978-953-55951-3-7 [Što, kako i za koga/WHW]
ISBN 978-953-7372-27-9 [Multimedijalni institut]
A Cip catalog record for this book is available from the
National and University Library in Zagreb under 000907085
With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the
European Union
ZAGREB • ¶ May • 2015
Public Library
1.
Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug
& Tomislav Medak
75
Public Library (essay)
2.
Paul Otlet
87
Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences
(Repertory — Classification — Office
of Documentation)
3.
McKenzie Wark
111
Metadata Punk
4.
Tomislav Medak
The Future After the Library
UbuWeb and Monoskop’s Radical Gestures
121
Marcell Mars,
Manar Zarroug
& Tomislav Medak
Public library (essay)
In What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution? 01 Robert Darnton considers how a complete collapse of the social order (when absolutely
everything — all social values — is turned upside
down) would look. Such trauma happens often in
the life of individuals but only rarely on the level
of an entire society.
In 1789 the French had to confront the collapse of
a whole social order—the world that they defined
retrospectively as the Ancien Régime — and to find
some new order in the chaos surrounding them.
They experienced reality as something that could
be destroyed and re
ce our society, obsessed with market logic, has made it impossible for the library to perform its main mission. Such
proposals, if they do not insist on universal access
to knowledge for all members, are Trojan horses for
the silent but galloping disappearance of the public
library from the historical stage. Sociability—produced by public libraries, with all the richness of its
various appearances—will be best preserved if we
manage to fight for the values upon which we have
built the public library: universal access to knowledge for each member of our society.
Freedom, equality, and brotherhood need brave librarians practicing civil disobedience.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Monoskop, UbuWeb
are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures
built and maintained by brave librarians practicing
civil disobedience which the world of researchers
in the humanities rely on. These projects are re-inventing the public library in the gap left by today’s
institutions in crisis.
Library Genesis15 is an online repository with over
a million books and is the first project in history to
offer everyone on the Internet free download of its
entire book collection (as of this writing, about fifteen terabytes of data), together with the all metadata
(MySQL dump) and PHP/HTML/Java Script code
for webpages. The most popular earlier reposito15 See http://libgen.org/.
82
M. Mars • M. Zarroug
ields in the humanities maintains,
catalogs, annotates, and initiates discussions around
it. It also as a courseware extension to the self-organized education platform The Public School.17
16 Andrew Losowsky, “Library.nu, Book Downloading Site,
Targeted in Injunctions Requested by 17 Publishers,” Huffington Post, 15 February 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/02/15/librarynu-book-downloading-injunction_
n_1280383.html.
17 “The Public School”, The Public School, n.d.,
https://www.thepublicschool.org/.
Public library (essay)
83
UbuWeb18 is the most significant and largest online
archive of avant-garde art; it was initiated and is lead
by conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. UbuWeb,
although still informal, has grown into a relevant
and recognized critical institution of contemporary
art. Artists want to see their work in its catalog and
thus agree to a relationship with UbuWeb that has
no formal contractual obligations.
Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, culture, and media
technology, with a special focus on the avant-garde,
conceptual, and media arts of Eastern and Central
Europe; it was launched by Dušan Barok and others.
In the form of a blog Dušan uploads to Monoskop.
org/log an online catalog of curated titles (at the
moment numbering around 3,000), and, as with
UbuWeb, it is becoming more and more relevant
as an online resource.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Kenneth Goldsmith,
and Dušan Barok show us that the future of the
public library does not need crisis management,
venture capital, start-up incubators, or outsourcing but simply the freedom to continue
being metadata-punks. On the one
hand, it is about freeing information about information rather than the information itself. We need
to move up the order of informational density and
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McKenzie Wark
control. On the other hand, it might be an idea to
be a bit discreet about it. Maybe not everyone needs
to know about it. Perhaps it is time to practice what
Zach Blas calls infomatic opacity.
Three projects seem to embody much of this
spirit to me. One I am not even going to name or
discuss, as discretion seems advisable in that case.
It takes matters off the internet and out of circulation among strangers. Ask me about it in person if
we meet in person.
The other two are Monoskop Log and UbuWeb.
It is hard to know what to call them. They are websites, archives, databases, collections, repositories,
but they are also a bit more than that. They could be
thought of also as the work of artists or of curators;
of publishers or of writers; of archivists or researchers. They contain lots of files. Monoskop is mostly
books and journals; UbuWeb is mostly video and
audio. The work they contain is mostly by or about
the historic avant-gardes.
Monoskop Log bills itself as “an educational
open access online resource.” It is a component part
of Monoskop, “a wiki for collaborative studies of
art, media and the humanities.” One commenter
thinks they see the “fingerprint of the curator” but
nobody is named as its author, so let’s keep it that
way. It is particularly strong on Eastern European
avant-garde material. UbuWeb is the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, and is “a completely independent
resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde,
ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.”
There’s two aspects to consider here. One is the
wealth of free material both sites collect. For any-
Metadata Punk
115
body trying to teach, study or make work in the
avant-garde tradition these are very useful resources.
The other is the ongoing selection, presentation and
explanation of the material going on at these sites
themselves. Both of them model kinds of ‘curatorial’
or ‘publishing’ behavior.
For instance, Monoskop has wiki pages, some
better than Wikipedia, which contextualize the work
of a given artist or movement. UbuWeb offers “top
ten” lists by artists or scholars which give insight
not only into the collection but into the work of the
person making the selection.
Monoskop and UbuWeb are tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the artworld, of publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical and
political-economic constraints of all three. As it
says in the Communist Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that
question in the era of the culture industries, they try
to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic
for answering the property question in the era of
the vulture industries.
This takes the form of moving from data to metadata, expressed in the form of the move from writing
to publishing, from art-making to curating, from
research to archiving. Another way of thinking this,
suggested by Hiroki Azuma would be the move from
narrative to database. The object of critical attention
acquires a third dimension, a kind of informational
depth. The objects before us are not just a text or an
image but databases of potential texts and images,
with metadata attached.
116
McKenzie Wark
The object of any avant-garde is always to practice the relation between aesthetics and everyday
life with a new kind of intensity. UbuWeb and
Monoskop seem to me to be intimations of just
such an avant-garde movement. One that does not
offer a practice but a kind of meta-practice for the
making of the aesthetic within the everyday.
Crucial to this project is the shifting of aesthetic
intention from the level of the individual work to the
database of works. They contain a lot of material, but
not just any old thing. Some of the works available
here are very rare, but not all of them are. It is not
just rarity, or that the works are available for free.
It is more that these are careful, artful, thoughtful
collections of material. There are the raw materials here with which to construct a new civilization.
So we lost the battle, but the war goes on. This
civilization is over, and even its defenders know it.
We live in among ruins that accrete in slow motion.
It is not so much a civil war as an incivil war, waged
against the very conditions of existence of life itself.
So even if we have no choice but to use its technologies and cultures, the task is to build another way
of life among the ruins. Here are some useful practices, in and on and of the ruins. ❧
Metadata Punk
117
118
public library
http://midnightnotes.memoryoftheworld.org/
119
Tomislav Medak
The Future After the Library
UbuWeb and Monoskop’s
Radical Gestures
The institution of the public library has crystallized,
developed and advanced around historical junctures
unleashed by epochal economic, technological and
political changes. A series of crises since the advent
of print have contributed to the configuration of the
institutional entanglement of the public library as
we know it today:01 defined by a publicly available
collection, housed in a public building, indexed and
made accessible with a help of a public catalog, serviced by trained librarians and supported through
public financing. Libraries today embody the idea
of universal access to all knowledge, acting as custodians of a culture of reading, archivi
sformed e-books into
closed silos. Both the decommodification of access
and the overcoming of the reified construct of the
The Future After the Library
131
self-enclosed work in the form of a book come at
the cost of illegality.
Even the avant-gardes in all their inappropriable
and idiosyncratic recalcitrance fall no less under
the legally delimited space of copyrightable works.
As they shift format, new claims of ownership and
appropriation are built. Copyright is a normative
classification that is totalizing, regardless of the
effects of leaky networks speaking to the contrary.
Few efforts have insisted on the subverting of juridical classification by copyright more lastingly than
the UbuWeb archive. Espousing the avant-gardes’
ethos of appropriation, for almost 20 years it has
collected and made accessible the archives of the
unknown; outsider, rare and canonized avant-gardes and contemporary art that would otherwise remained reserved for the vaults and restricted access
channels of esoteric markets, selective museological
presentations and institutional archives. Knowing
that asking to publish would amount to aligning itself with the totalizing logic of copyright, UbuWeb
has shunned the permission culture. At the level of
poetical operation, as a gesture of displacing the cultural archive from a regime of limited, into a regime
of unlimited access, it has created provocations and
challenges directed at the classifying and ordering
arrangements of property over cultural production.
One can only assume that as such it has become a
mechanism for small acts of treason for the artists,
who, short of turning their back fully on the institutional arrangements of the art world they inhabit,
use UbuWeb to release their own works into unlimited circulation on the net. Sometimes there might
132
Tomislav Medak
be no way or need to produce a work outside the
restrictions imposed by those institutions, just as
sometimes it is for academics impossible to avoid
the contradictory world of academic publishing,
yet that is still no reason to keep one’s allegiance to
their arrangements.
At the same time UbuWeb has played the game
of avant-gardist subversion: “If it doesn’t exist on
the internet, it doesn’t exist”. Provocation is most
effective when it is ignorant of the complexities of
the contexts that it is directed at. Its effect starts
where fissures in the defense of the opposition start
to show. By treating UbuWeb as massive evidence
for the internet as a process of reappropriation, a
process of “giving to all”, its volunteering spiritus
movens, Kenneth Goldsmith, has been constantly rubbing copyright apologists up the wrong way.
Rather than producing qualifications, evasions and
ambivalences, straightforward affirmation of copy
ing, plagiarism and reproduction as a dominant
yet suppressed mode of operation of digital culture re-enacts the avant-gardes’ gesture of taking
no hostages from the officially sanctioned systems
of classification. By letting the incumbents of control over cultural production react to the norm of
copying, you let them struggle to dispute the norm
rather than you having to try to defend the norm.
UbuWeb was an early-comer, starting in 1996
and still functioning today on seemingly similar
technology, it’s a child of the early days of World
Wide Web and the promissory period of the experimental internet. It’s resolutely Web 1.0, with
a single maintainer, idiosyncratically simple in its
The Future After the Library
133
layout and programmatically committed to the
eventual obsolescence and sudden abandonment.
No platform, no generic design, no widgets, no
kludges and no community features. Only Beckett
avec links. Endgame.
A Book is an Index is an Index is an Index...
Since the first book flood, the librarian dream of
epistemological formalization has revolved around
the aspiration to c
the commodifying forces of expanding copyright
protections and digital rights management, control
over the data flows and command over the classification and order of information. In a world of
collapsing planetary boundaries and unequal development, those who control the epistemic order
136
Tomislav Medak
control the future.08 The Googles and the NSAs run
on capturing totality — the world’s knowledge and
communication made decipherable, organizable and
controllable. The instabilities of the epistemic order
that the library continues to instigate at its margins
contributes to keeping the future open beyond the
script of ‘commodify and control’. In their acts of
re-appropriation UbuWeb and Monoskop.org are
but a reminder of the resilience of libraries’ instability that signals toward a future that can be made
radically open. ❧
08 In his article “Controlling the Future—Edward Snowden and
the New Era on Earth”, (accessed April 13, 2015, http://www.
eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-19-altvater-en.html), Elmar
Altvater makes a comparable argument that the efforts of
the “Five Eyes” to monitor the global communication flows,
revealed by Edward Snowden, and the control of the future
social development defined by the urgency of mitigating the
effects of the planetary ecological crisis cannot be thought
apart.
The Future After the Library
137
138
public library
ht
ubuweb in Sekulic 2018
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 int
ubuweb in Sollfrank 2018
he
Creation of Cultural Memory and the Commons
By Cornelia Sollfrank
Digital artworks tend to have a problematic relationship with the white
cube—in particular, when they are intended and optimized for online
distribution. While curators and exhibition-makers usually try to avoid
showing such works altogether, or at least aim at enhancing their sculptural
qualities to make them more presentable, the exhibition _Top Tens_ featured an
abundance of web quality digital artworks, thus placing emphasis on the very
media condition of such digital artifacts. The exhibition took place at the
Onassis Cultural Center in Athens in March 2018 and was part of the larger
festival _Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens_ ,1 an event to introduce the
online archive UbuWeb2 to the Greek audience and discuss related cultural,
ethical, technical, and legal issues. This text takes the event—and the
exhibition in particular—as a starting point for a closer look at UbuWeb and
the role an artistic approach can play in building cultural memory within the
neoliberal knowledge economy.
_UbuWeb—The Cultural Memory of the Avant-Garde_
Since Kenneth Goldsmith started Ubu in 1997 the site has become a major point
of reference for anyone interested in exploring twentieth-century avant-garde
art. The online archive provides free and unrestricted access to a remarkable
collection of thousands of artworks—among them almost 700 films and videos,
over 1000 sound art pieces, dozens of filmed dance productions, an
overwhelming amount of visual poetry and conceptual writing, critical
documents, but also musical scores, patents, electronic music resources, plus
an editio
ooks, for
example, where the property status of the material object comes into play.
Given the imbalance between cultural requirements, copyright law, and the
technical possibilities, it is not surprising that private initiatives are
being founded with the aim to collect and preserve cultural memory. These
initiatives make use of the affordability and availability of digital
technology and its infrastructures, and they take responsibility for the
preservation of cultural goods by simply ignoring copyright induced
restrictions, i.e. opposing the insatiable hunger of the IP regime for
control.
_Shadow Libraries_
Ubu was presented and discussed in Athens at an event titled _Shadow
Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens_ , thereby making clear reference to the ecosystem
of shadow libraries. A library, in general, is an institution that collects,
orders, and makes published information available while taking into account
archival, economic, and synoptic aspects. A shadow library does exactly the
same thing, but its mission is not an official one. Usually, the
infrastructure of shadow libraries is conceived, built, and run by a private
initiative, an individual, or a small group of people, who often prefer to
remain anonymous for obvious reasons. In terms of the media content provided,
most shadow libraries are peer-produced in the sense that they are based on
the contributions of a community of sup
, social and ecological justice—without at the same
time organizing on the terrain of commons, the non-commodified systems of
social production. Commons are not just a ‘third way’ beyond state and market
failures; they are a vehicle for emerging communities of struggle to claim
ownership to their own conditions of life and reproduction.”29 It is their
purpose to satisfy people’s basic needs and empower them by providing access
to alternative means of subsistence. In that sense, commons can be understood
as an _experimental zone_ in which participants can learn to negotiate
responsibilities, social relations, and peer-based means of production.
_Art and Commons_
Projects such as UbuWeb, Monoskop,30 aaaaarg,31 Memory of the World,32 and
0xdb33 vary in size, they have different forms of organization and foci, but
they all care for specific cultural goods and make sure these goods remain
widely accessible—be it digital copies of artworks and original documents,
books and other text formats, videos, film, or sound and music. Unlike the
large shadow libraries introduced above, which aim to provide access to
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mainly academic papers and books,
thus trying to fully cover the world of scholarly and academic works, the
smaller artist-run projects are of different nature. While UbuWeb’s founder,
for instance, also promotes a generally unrestricted access to cultural goods,
his approach with UbuWeb is to build a curated archive with copies of artworks
that he considers to be relevant for his very context.34 The selection is
based on personal assessment and preference and cared for affectionately.
Despite its comprehensiveness, it still can be considered a “personal website”
on which the artist shares things relevant to him. As such, he is in good
company with similar “artist-run shadow libraries”, which all provide a
technical infrastructure with which they share resources, while the resources
are of specific relevance to their providers.
Just like the large pirate libraries, these artistic archiving and library
practices challenge the notion of culture as private property and
ultural
production in proprietary terms and toward paradigms of creativity based on a
culture of collecting, organizing, curating, and sharing content.”36 And by
doing so, he produces major contradictions, or rather he allows the already
existing contradictions to come to light. The artistic archives and libraries
are precarious in terms of their legal status, while it is exactly due to
their disregard of copyright that cultural resources could be built that
exceed the relevance of most official archives that are bound to abide the
law. In fact, there are no comparable official resources, which is why the
function of these projects is at least twofold: education and preservation.37
Maybe UbuWeb and the other, smaller or larger, shadow libraries do not qualify
as commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of
goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among
themselves. This would require collective, formalized, and transparent types
of organization. Furthermore, most of the digital items they circulate are
privately owned and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons
resources. These projects, in many respects, are in a preliminary stage by
pointing to the _ideal of culture as a commons_. By providing access to
cultural goods and knowledge that would otherwise not be available at all or
inaccessible for large par
ibition was a brave and bold statement
by the art institution: The Onassis Cultural Centre, one of Athens’ most
prestigious cultural institutions, dared to adopt a resolutely political
stance for a—at least in juridical terms—questionable project, as Ubu lives
from the persistent denial of copyright. Neglecting the concerns of the
individual authors and artists for a moment was a necessary precondition in
order to make space for rethinking the future of cultural production.
________________
Special thanks to Eric Steinhauer and all the artists and amateur librarians
who are taking care of our cultural memory.
1 Festival program online: Onassis Cultural Centre, “Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb
in Athens,”
2 _UbuWeb_ is a massive online archive of avant-garde art created over the
last two decades by New York-based artist and writer Kenneth Goldsmith.
Website of the archive:
3 Kaja Marczewska, _This Is Not a Copy. Writing at the Iterative Turn_ (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 22.
4 For further reading: Kenneth Goldsmith, _Uncreative Writing: Managing
Language in the Digital Age_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
5 Many works in the archive stem from the pre-digital era, and there is no
precise knowledge of the sources where Ubu obtains its materia
ubuweb in Sollfrank & Goldsmith 2013
w it could vanish. I could get sued. I could
get bored. Maybe I just walk away and blow it up, I don't know! Why do I need
to keep doing all this work for? [21:03] So if you find something on the
Internet that you loved, don't assume it's going to be there forever. Download
it. Always make your own archive. Don't ever assume that it's waiting there
for you, because it won't be there when you look for it.
C.S.: In the cloud…
Fuck the cloud. I hate the cloud.
being specifically concrete poetry in 1996, to today
being all avant-garde.
[3:09]
Avantgarde
[3:15]
[3:30] And then something happened in the digital, where it seemed to... All
of that fell off. Because we already knew that. [3:42] So it was an orphan
term. It became detached from its nefarious pre-digital context. And it was an
open term. [3:51] I was like, we can actually use this term again, avant-
garde, and redefine it as a way of, you know, multi-media, impurity,
difference, all sorts of ways that it was never allowed to be used before. So
I've actually inhabited this term, and repurposed it. [4:15] So I don't really
know what avant-garde is, it's always changing. And UbuWeb is an archive that
is not pure avant-garde. You look at it and say, no, things are wrong there.
There's rock musicians, and there's performance artists, and there's
novelists. [4:33] I mean, it doesn't quite look like the avant-garde looked
before the digital. But then, everything looks different after the digital.
[4:41]
Selection / curation
[4:46]
I don't know anything. I am a poet. I'm not a historian, I'm not an academic.
I don't know anything, I've just got a sense: that might be interesting, that
sort of feels avant-garde. I mean, it is ridiculous, it's terrible: I am the
wrong person to do this. But, you know, nobody stopped me, and so I've been
doing it. You know, anybo
do it. [5:11] It's very hard to have something
on Ubu, and that's why it's so good. That's why it's not archive-type of work,
where everything can go, and there're good things there, but there is no one
working as a gatekeeper to say, actually this is better than that. [5:26] And
I think one of the problems with net culture, or the web culture, is that
we've decided to suspend judgment. We can't say that one thing is better than
another thing, because everything is equal. There's a part of me that really
likes that idea, and it creates fabulous chaos. But I think it is a sort of a
curatorial job to go in and make sense of some of that chaos. In a very small
way, that's what I try to do on UbuWeb. [5:52] You know, it's the avant-garde,
it's not a big project. It's a rather small slice of culture that one can have
a point of view. I'm not saying that's right. It's probably very wrong. But
nobody else it's doing it, so I figured, you know… [6:12] But by virtue of the
fact that there's only one UbuWeb, it's become institutional. And the reason
that there is only one UbuWeb is that UbuWeb ignores copyright. And everybody
else, of course, is afraid of copyright. There should be hundreds of UbuWebs.
It is ridiculous that there's only one. But everybody else is afraid of
copyright, so that nobody would put anything on. [6:41] We just act like
copyright doesn't exist. Copyright, what's that? Never heard of it.
[6:48]
Contents
[5:52]
I think that these artifacts that are on UbuWeb are very valuable historically
and culturally, they are very significant. But economically, I don't think
they had that type of value. And I love small labels that try to put these
things out. But they inevitably loose money by trying to put these things out.
So when somebody does put something out, sometimes things on Ubu get released
from a small label, and I take them off the site, because I want to support
those things. [7:28] But it's hard, and people are not doing it for the money.
Nobody ever got into sound poetry or orchestral avant-garde music for the
money. [7:37] So it's kind of a weird lovely grey area that we've been able to
explore, a utopia, really, that we've been able to en
very
good understanding of copyright. And I have a very good understating of the
way that copyright works. So I can anticipate things. I can usually negotiate
something with somebody who, you know… [8:26] There's so many stories when
copyright is being used as a battering tool. It's not real. I had one instance
when a very powerful literary agency in New York… I received a cease and
desist DMCA Takedown, which I require a proper takedown. It was for William S.
Burroughs, and the list went on for pages and pages and pages. And then, at
the end, it says, "Under the threat of perjury, I state these facts to be
true," signed such and such person. [9:05] Now, what they did, they went into
UbuWeb and they put the words "William S. Burroughs," and they came up with
every instance of William S. Burroughs. If William S. Burroughs is mentioned
in an academic paper: that's our copyright. Nick Currie Momus wrote a song "I
Love You William S. Burroughs.” Now, Nick gave UbuWeb all of his songs. I know
that Nick owns the copyright to that. [9:30] I said, you know, it's
ridiculous! And even the things that they were claiming… It was the most
ridiculous thing. [9:37] So I wrote them back. I said: Look, I get what you're
trying to do here, but you're really going about it the wrong way. It's very
irresponsible just putting his name in the search engine, cutting and pasting,
and damn you own the copyright. You don't own the copyright to almost any of
that! And as a matter of fact, under law you perjured yourself. And I can came
right back and sue you, because this is a complete lie. But I said, look, lets
work together. If there's something that you feel that you re
up if they really don't
want it there? [12:30] So it's an unstable archive. What's there today may not
be there tomorrow. And I kind of like that too.
[12:38]
Permission culture
[12:42]
I understand people get nervous. They would prefer me to ask. But if I ask, I
couldn't have built this archive. Because if you ask, you start negotiations,
you make a contract, you need lawyers, you need permissions. And if something
has... a film has music in the background by the Rolling Stones, you have to
clear the right for the Rolling Stones and pay that a little bit of money. And
you know, licenses... I couldn't do that. I do this with no money. That would
take millions… [13:14] To do UbuWeb permission, the right way, correctly,
would take millions of millions of euros. And I built this whole thing from
nothing. Zero money. [13:26] So, you know... I think I'd love to be able to
ask for permission, do things the right way. It is the right way to do things.
But it wouldn't be possible to make an archive like this, that way.
[13:40]
Cornelia Sollfrank: How much does it happen that you are approached by artists
who say, please put my work down?
[13:47]
Almost never, almost never. It's usually the estates, art dealers, the
business people, you know, who are circling around an artist. But it's almost
never artists themselves. Artists, you know... I don't know, I just thi
Take them! We are so busy dealing with
forgeries, well, you know, exactly what your piece was about. And they laughed
at me. They were like, have fun, it's all yours, glad, go away. [15:32] So I
kind of feel, if you ask Jean Dubuffet, I would assume that Dubuffet
understood that his music production was as serious as his paintings. And this
is the sort of beautiful revisionism of the avant-garde. This is a perfect
example of the revisionism of the avant-garde that I'm talking about. You say,
oh, you know, he was actually as good of a composer as he was a painter.
[15:58] So, you know, this is the kind of weird thing that's happened on
UbuWeb, I think. [16:04] But what's even better, is that UbuWeb, you know... I
care about Jean Dubuffet, or I care about Art Brut, and the history of all
that. [16:14] But usually what happens is, kids come into UbuWeb and they know
nothing about the history. And they’re usually kids that are making dance
music. But they go, oh, all these weird sounds at this place, lets take them.
And so they plunder the archive. So you have Bruce Nauman, you know, "Get out
of my life!" on dance floors in São Paulo, mixed in with the beat. And that to
me is the misuse of the archive that I think is really fantastic.
[16:48]
Technical infrastructure
[16:53]
It's web 1.0. I write everything in HTML, by hand. Hand-coded like I did in
1996, the same BBEdit, the same program.
[17:04]>
C.S.: But it's searchable.
[17:06]
Yea, it's got like a dumb, you know, a little free search engine on it, but I
don't do anything. You see, this is the thing. [17:15] For many, many years
people would always come up to me and say, we'd like to put UbuWeb in a
database. And I said no. It’s working really well as it is. And, you know,
imagine if Ubu had been locked up in some sort of horrible SQL database. And
the administrator of the database walks away, the guy that knows all that
stuff walks away with the keys – which always happens. No… [17:39] This way it
is free, is open, is simple, is backwardly compatible – it always works.
[17:45] I like the simplicity of it. It's not different than it was 17 years
ago. It's really dumb, but it does what it does very well.
[17:54]
Search engines
[17:58]
I removed it from Google. Because, you know, people would have set a Google
alert. And it was mostly the agents, or the estates
spending corresponding with
people. And once I took it off from Google it got much better.
[18:33]
Copyright practice
[18:37]
Nobody seemed to care until I started to put film on, and then the filmmakers
went crazy. And so, that was something. [18:47] There was a big blow-up on the
FrameWorks film list. Do you know FrameWorks? It's the biggest avant-garde
film list – Listserv. And a couple of years ago Ubu got hacked, and went down
for a little while. And there was a big celebration on the FrameWorks list.
They said, the enemy is finally gone! We can return to life as normal. So I
responded to them. [19:14] I wrote an open letter to FrameWorks (which you can
actually find on UbuWeb) challenging them, saying, actually Ubu is a friend of
yours. I'm actually promoting your work for no money. I love what you do. I'm
a fan. There's no way I'm an enemy. [19:31] And I said, by the way, if you are
celebrating Ubu being down, I think it's a perfect time for you to now built
Ubu the way it should have been. You guys have all the materials. You are the
artists, you have all the knowledge. Go ahead and do it right, that would be
great. You have my blessing, please do it... Shut them down. Nobody ever
responded. Suddenly the thread died. [20:00] Nobody wants to do anything. It's
kind of, they considered it right to complain, but when asked to... They have
the tools to do it right. I'm a poet, what do I know about avant-garde film?
They know everything. But when I told them, please, you know, nobody's going
to lift a finger. [20:18] It's easier for people to complain and hate it. But
in fact, to make something better is something that people are not going to
do. So life went on. It went up and we moved on.
[20:32]
Un/stable archives
[20:36]
If you work on something for an hour a day for 17 years – 2 hours, 3 hours –
you come up with something really substantial. [20:45] The web is very
ephemeral, and UbuWeb is just as ephemeral. It’s amazing that it's been there
for as long as it has, but tomorrow it could vanish. I could get sued. I could
get bored. Maybe I just walk away and blow it up, I don't know! Why do I need
to keep doing all this work for? [21:03] So if you find something on the
Internet that you loved, don't assume it's going to be there forever. Download
it. Always make your own archive. Don't ever assume that it's waiting there
for you, because it won't be there when you look for it.
C.S.: In the cloud…
Fuck the cloud. I hate the cloud.
ubuweb in Stalder 2018
materials, though they have
been fully digitalized, may only be accessed in part or exclusively
inside the facilities of a particular institution. Whereas companies
such as Google can afford to wage long legal battles, and in the
meantime create precedents, public institutions must proceed with great
caution, not least to avoid the accusation of using public funds to
violate copyright laws. Thus, they tend to fade into the background and
leave users, who are unfamiliar with the complex legal situation, with
the impression that they are even more out-of-date than they often are.
Informal actors, who explicitly operate beyond the realm of copyright
law, are not faced with such restrictions. UbuWeb, for instance, which
is the largest online archive devoted to the history of
twentieth-century avant-garde art, was not created by an art museum but
rather by the initiative of an individual artist, Kenneth Goldsmith.
Since 1996, he has been collecting historically relevant materials that
were no longer in distribution and placing them online for free and
without any stipulations. He forgoes the process of obtaining the rights
to certain works of art because, as he remarks on the website, "Let\'s
face it, if we had to get permission from everyone on UbuWeb, there
would be no UbuWeb."[^18^](#c2-note-0018){#c2-note-0018a} It would
simply be too demanding to do so. Because he pursues the project without
any financial interest and has saved so much []{#Page_66
type="pagebreak" title="66"}from oblivion, his efforts have provoked
hardly any legal difficulties. On the contrary, UbuWeb has become so
important that Goldsmith has begun to receive more and more material
directly from artists and their heirs, who would like certain works not
to be forgotten. Nevertheless, or perhaps for this very reason,
Goldsmith repeatedly stresses the instability of his archive, which
could disappear at any moment if he loses interest in maintaining it or
if something else happens. Users are therefore able to download works
from UbuWeb and archive, on their own, whatever items they find most
important. Of course, this fragility contradicts the idea of an archive
as a place for long-term preservation. Yet such a task could only be
undertaken by an institution that is oriented toward the long term.
Because of the existing legal conditions, however, it is hardly likely
that such an institution will come about.
Whereas Goldsmith is highly adept at operating within a niche that not
only tolerates but also accepts the violation of formal copyright
claims, large websites responsible for the uncontrolled dissemination of
digital content do not bother with such niceties. Their purpose is
rather to ensure that all popular content i
ubuweb in Thylstrup 2019
xchanging books that today has grown into a massive and distributed file-
sharing project. It is primarily run by individuals, but it has also received
public funding, which shows that what at first glance appears as a simple case
of piracy simultaneously serves as a much more complex infrapolitical
structure. The second case, Monoskop, distinguishes itself by its boutique
approach to digitization. Monoskop too is characterized by its territorial
trajectory, rooted in Bratislava’s digital scene as an attempt to establish an
intellectual platform for the study of avant-garde (digital) cultures that
could connect its Bratislava-based creators to a global scene. Finally, the
chapter looks at UbuWeb, a shadow library dedicated to avant-garde cultural
works ranging from text and audio to images and film. Founded in 1996 as a US-
based noncommercial file-sharing site by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in response to
the marginal distribution of crucial avant-garde material, UbuWeb today offers
a wealth of avant-garde sound art, video, and textual works.
As the case studies show, shadow libraries have become significant mass
digitization infrastructures that offer the user free access to academic
articles and books, often by means of illegal file-sharing. They are informal
and unstable networks that rely on active user participation across a wide
spectrum, from deeply embedded people who have established file-sharing sites
to the everyday user occasionally sending the odd book or article to a friend
or colleague. As Lars Eckstein notes, most shadow libraries are characterized
not only by their informal character, but also by the speed with which they
operate, providin
gnty. Yet, even this territorial
focus holds a strategic dimension. As Barok notes, Monoskop’s ambition was not
only to gain new knowledge about media art in the region, but also to cash in
on the cultural capital into which this knowledge could potentially be
converted. Thus, its territorial matrix first and foremost translates into
Foucault’s famous dictum that “knowledge is power.” But it is nevertheless
also testament to the importance of including more complex spatial dynamics in
one’s analytical matrix of shadow libraries, if one wishes to understand them
as more than globalized breakers of code and arbiters of what Manuel Castells
once called the “space of flows.”48
## UbuWeb
If Monoskop is one of the most comprehensive shadow libraries to emerge from
critical-artistic practice, UbuWeb is one of the earliest ones and has served
as an inspirational example for Monoskop. UbuWeb is a website that offers an
encyclopedic scope of downloadable audio, video, and plain-text versions of
avant-garde art recordings, films, and books. Most of the books fall in the
category of small-edition artists’ books and are presented on the site with
permission from the artists in question, who are not so concerned with
potential loss of revenue since most of the works are officially out of print
and never made any money even when they were commercially available. At first
glance, UbuWeb’s aesthetics appear almost demonstratively spare. Still
formatted in HTML, it upholds a certain 1990s net aesthetics that has resisted
the revamps offered by the new century’s more dynamic infrastructures. Yet, a
closer look reveals that UbuWeb offers a wealth of content, ranging from high
art collections to much more rudimentary objects. Moreover, and more
fundamentally, its critical archival practice raises broader infrapolitical
questions of cultural hierarchies, infrastructures, and domination.
### Shadow Libraries between Gift Economies and Marginalized Forms of
Distribution
UbuWeb was founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in response to the marginal
distribution of crucial avant-garde material. It provides open access both to
out-of-print works that find a second life through digital art reprint and to
the work of contemporary artists. Upon its opening in 2001, Kenneth Goldsmith
termed UbuWeb’s economic infrastructure a “gift economy” and framed it as a
political statement that highlighted certain problems in the distribution of
and access to intellectual materials:
> Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian
politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication
considerations, information can literally “be free”: on UbuWeb, we give it
away. … Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from
academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in
compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves. … UbuWeb posts
much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound
files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as
fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist
order. Instead, we receive glowing emails from artists, publishers, and record
labels finding their work on UbuWeb, thanking us for taking an interest in
what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We
happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with
unlimited space for them to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to
encompass hundreds of artists, thousands of files, and several gigabytes of
poetry.49
At the time of its launch, UbuWeb garnered extraordinary attention and divided
communities along lines of access and rights to historical and contemporary
artists’ media. It was in this range of responses to UbuWeb that one could
discern the formations of new infrastructural positions on digital archives,
how they should be made available, and to whom. Yet again, these legal
positions were accompanied by a territorial dynamic, including the impact of
regional differences in cultural policy on UbuWeb. Thus, as artist Jason Simon
notes, there were significant differences between the ways in which European
and North American distributors related to UbuWeb. These differences, Simon
points out, were rooted in “medium-specific questions about infrastructure,”
which differ “from the more interpretive discussion that accompanied video's
wholesale migration into fine art exhibition venues.”50 European pre-recession
public money thus permitted nonprofit distributors to embrace infrastructures
such as UbuWeb, while American distributors were much more hesitant toward
UbuWeb’s free-access model. When recession hit Europe in the late 2000s,
however, the European links to UbuWeb’s infrastructures crumbled while “the
legacy American distributors … have been steadily adapting.”51 The territorial
modulations in UbuWeb’s infrastructural set-up testify not only to how shadow
libraries such as UbuWeb are inherently always linked up to larger political
events in complex ways, but also to latent ephemerality of the entire project.
Goldsmith has more than once asserted that UbuWeb’s insistence on
“independent” infrastructures also means a volatile existence: “… 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.” Goldsmith’s
emphasis on the ephemerality of UbuWeb is a shared condition of most shadow
libraries, most of which exist only as ghostly reminders with nonfunctional
download links or simply as 404 pages, once they pull the plug. Rather than
lamenting this volatile existence, however, Goldsmith embraces it as an
infrapolitical stance. As Cornelia Solfrank points out, UbuWeb was—and still
is—as much an “archival critical practice that highlights the legal and social
ramifications of its self-created distribution and archiving system as it is
about the content hosted on the site.”52 UbuWeb is thus not so much about
authenticity as it is about archival defiance, appropriation, and self-
reflection. Such broader and deeper understandings of archival theory and
practice allow us to conceive of it as the kind of infrapolitics that,
according to James C. Scott, “provides much of the cultural and structural
underpinning of the more visible political attention on which our attention
has generally been focused.”53 The infrapolitics of UbuWeb is devoted to
hatching new forms of organization, creating new enclaves of freedom in the
midst of orthodox ways of life, and inventing new structures of production and
dissemination that reveal not only the content of their material but also
their marginalized infrastructural conditions and the constellation of social
forces that lead to their online circulation.54
The infrapolitics of UbuWeb is testament not only to avant-garde cultures, but
also to what Hito Steyerl in her _Defense of Poor Images_ refers to as the
“neoliberal radicalization of the culture as commodity” and the “restructuring
of global media industries.” 55 These materials “circulate partly in the void
left by state organizations” that find it too difficult to maintain digital
distribution infrastructures and the art world’s commercial ecosystems, which
offer the cultural materials hosted on UbuWeb only a liminal existence. Thus,
while UbuWeb on the one hand “reveals the decline and marginalization of
certain cultural materials” whose production were often “considered a task of
the state,”56 on the other hand it shows how intellectual content is
increasingly privatized, not only in corporate terms but also through
individuals, which in UbuWeb’s case is expressed in Kenneth Goldsmith, who
acts as the sole archival gatekeeper.57
## The Infrapolitics of Shadow Libraries
If the complexity of shadow libraries cannot be reduced to the contrastive
codes of “right” and “wrong” and global-local binaries, the question remains
how to theorize the cultural politics of shadow libraries. This final section
outlines three central infrapolitical aspects of shadow libraries: access,
speed, and gift.
Mass digitization poses two important questions to knowledge infrastructures:
a logistical question of access and a strategic question of to whom to
allocate that access. Copyright poses a significant logistical barrier between
users and
ol-
me.info/node/841). 44. “Dušan Barok: Interview,” _Neural_ 44 (2010), 10. 45.
Aymeric Mansoux is a senior lecturer at the Piet Zwart Institute whose
research deals with the defining, constraining, and confining of cultural
freedom in the context of network-based practices. Marcel Mars is an advocate
of free software and a researcher who is also active in a shadow library named
_Public Library,_
known as Memory of the World). 46. “Dušan Barok,” Memory of the World,
_Neural_ 44 (2010), 10. 48. Castells 1996. 49. Kenneth Goldsmith,”UbuWeb Wants
to Be Free” (last modified July 18, 2007),
Jason Simon, “Before and After UbuWeb: A Conversation about Artists’ Film and
Video Distribution,” _Rhizome_ , February 20, 2014.
artists-film-and-vid>. 51. King and Simon 2014. 52. Sollfrank 2015. 53. Scott
1990, 184. 54. For this, I am indebted to Hito Steyerl’s essay ”In Defense of
the Poor Image,” in her book _The Wretched of the Screen_ , 31–59. 55. Steyerl
2012, 36. 56. Steyerl 2012, 39. 57. Sollfrank 2015. 58. Other significant open
source movements include Free Software Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation,
and several open access initiatives in science. 59. Lessig 2005, 57. 60.
Philip 2005, 212. 61. See, for instance
s of these contemporary labyrinths as a “theater
where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung
herself).”59
In mass digitization, this new infrastructural imaginary feeds a looming
concern over how best to curate and infrastructurate cultural collections. It
is this concern that we see at play in the aforementioned institutional
concerns over how to best create meaningful paths in the cultural collections.
The main question that resounds is: where should the paths lead if there is no
longer one truth, that is, if the labyrinth has no center? Some mass
digitization projects seem to revel in this new reality. As we have seen,
shadow libraries such as Monoskop and UbuWeb use the affordances of the
digital to create new cultural connections outside of the formal hierarchies
of cultural memory institutions. Yet, while embraced by some, predictably the
new distribution of authority generates anxiety in the cultural memory circles
that had hitherto been able to hold claim to knowledge organization expertise.
This is the dizzying perspective that haunts the cultural memory professionals
faced with Europeana’s data governance model. Thus, as one Europeana
professional explained to me in 2010, “Europeana aims at an open-linked-data
model with a number of implications. One implication is that there will be no
control of data usage, which makes it possible, for i
s allow not only for dedicated and target-oriented research,
but also for new modes of search, of reading haphazardly “on the diagonal”
across genres and disciplines, as well as across institutional and national
borders that hitherto kept works and insights apart. As one spokesperson from
a prominent mass digitization company states, “digital collections have been
designed both to assist researchers in accessing original primary source
materials and to enable them to make serendipitous discoveries and unexpected
connections between sources.”73 And indeed, this sentiment reverberates in all
mass digitization projects from Europeana and Google Books to smaller shadow
libraries such as UbuWeb and Monoskop. Some scholars even argue that
serendipity takes on new forms due to digitization.74
It seems only natural, then, that mass digitization projects, and their
actors, have actively adopted the discourse of serendipity, both as a selling
point and a strategic claim. Talking about Google’s digitization program, Dr.
Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian and Director of Oxford University Library
Services, notes: “Library users have always loved browsing books for the
serendipitous discoveries they provide. Digital books offer a similar thrill,
but on multiple levels—deep entry into the texts or the ability to browse the
virtual shelf of books assembled from the world's great libra
2010. “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” _New Media & Society_ 12 (3): 347–364.
127. Gillespie, Tarleton. 2017. “Algorithmically Recognizable: Santorum’s Google Problem, and Google’s Santorum Problem.” _Information Communication and Society_ 20 (1): 63–80.
128. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. _The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference_. Boston: Little, Brown.
129. Goldate, Steven. 1996. “The Cyberflaneur: Spaces and Places on the Internet.” _Art Monthly Australia_ 91:15–18.
130. Goldsmith, Jack L., and Tim Wu. 2006. _Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World_. New York: Oxford University Press.
131. Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2007. “UbuWeb Wants to Be Free.” Last modified July 18, 2007.
132. Golumbia, David. 2009. _The Cultural Logic of Computation_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
133. Goriunova, Olga. 2012. _Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet_. New York: Routledge.
134. Gradmann, Stephan. 2009. “Interoperability: A Key Concept for Large Scale, Persistent Digital Libraries.” 1st DL.org Workshop at 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL).
135. Greene, Mark. 2010. “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore.” _American Archivist_ 73 (1): 175–203.
136. Grewal, David S. 2008. _Network Power: The Social Dynamic
ubuweb in WHW 2016
laws. But here the more
important tactic was to show the movement as an army of many and to
strengthen it through self-presentation. The exhibition presented Public
Library as a collection of collections, and the repertory form (used in archive science to describe a collection) was taken as the basic narrative procedure. It mobilized and activated several archives and open digital repositories, such as MayDay Rooms from London, The Ignorant Schoolmaster and
His Committees from Belgrade, Library Genesis and Aaaaaarg.org, Catalogue
of Free Books, (Digitized) Praxis, the digitized work of the Midnight Notes
Collective, and Textz.com, with special emphasis on activating the digital
repositories UbuWeb and Monoskop. Not only did the exhibition attempt to
enlist the gallery audience but, equally important, the project was testing
its own strength in building, articulating, announcing, and proposing, or
speculating on, a broader movement to oppose the copyright of cultural
goods within and adjacent to the art field.
Presenting such a movement in an art institution changes one of the
basic tenets of art, and for an art institution the project’s main allure probably lies in this kind of expansion of the art field. A shared politics is welcome, but nothing makes an art institution so happy as the sense of purpose that a project like Public Library can endow it with. (This, of course,
comes wi
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