(Roughly) Daily

UbuWeb, an open online collection of avant garde materials created by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, went live almost 30 years ago…

Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never even come close. UbuWeb functions on no money—we don’t take it, we don’t pay it, we don’t touch it; you’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. We’ve never applied for a grant or accepted a sponsorship; we remain happily unaffiliated, keeping us free and clean, allowing us to do what we want to do, the way we want to do it. Most important, UbuWeb has always been and will always be free and open to all: there are no memberships or passwords required. All labor is volunteered; our server space and bandwidth are donated by a likeminded group of intellectual custodians who believe in free access to knowledge. A gift economy of plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education, UbuWeb is visited daily by tens of thousands of people from every continent. We’re on numerous syllabuses, ranging from those for kindergarteners studying pattern poetry to those for postgraduates listening to hours of Jacques Lacan’s Séminaires. When the site goes down from time to time, as most sites do, we’re inundated by emails from panicked faculty wondering how they are going to teach their courses that week.

The site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists better known for other things—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham, the hip-hop of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the films of John Lennon, the radio plays of Ulrike Meinhof, the symphonies of Hanne Darboven, the country music of Julian Schnabel—most of which were originally put out in tiny editions, were critically ignored, and quickly vanished. 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 based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, hyped, or market-based center…

… These days there’s a lot of support for the way we go about things. Many think of UbuWeb as an institution. Artists both well established and lesser known try to contact us asking to be on the site. But it wasn’t always this way; for a long time many people despised UbuWeb, fearing that it was contributing to the erosion of long-standing hierarchies in the avant-garde world, fearing that it was leading to the decimation of certain art forms, fearing that it would tank entire art-based economies. Of course, none of that happened. We just happened to be there at the beginning of the web and had to ride the choppy currents of change as each successive wave washed over. Whereas we once used to receive daily cease-and-desist letters, today we rarely get any. It’s not that we’re doing anything different; it’s just that people’s attitudes toward copyright and distribution have evolved as the web has evolved.

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 internet service provider (ISP) pulls the plug, we get sued, or we simply grow tired of it. 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; crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; more often than not, the already small group 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 even ourselves…

And indeed, in January of last year, UbuWeb announced it was no longer active, posting: “As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.”

But last month, the site reappeared…

A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.

UbuWeb, @ubuweb.bsky.social.

(Image above: source)

* Lisbet Tellefsen

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As we celebrate collective memory, we might (make ourselves) remember that it was on this date in 1933 that Nazi Germany opened its first and longest-operaating concentration camp, Dachau. Initially intended to intern (then still Chancellor) Hitler’s political opponents (communists, social democrats, and other dissidents), it seeded what became a network of more than a thousand concentration camps, including subcamps, on Germany’s own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment.