Kenneth Goldsmith — UbuWeb founded

1996

Artists: Kenneth Goldsmith · Year: 1996 · Medium: Avant-garde art and literature archive website · Substrate: Self-hosted, minimal-design HTML; thousands of films, texts, sound recordings · Place: Philadelphia / New York, USA · Institution: Independent (Goldsmith personally) UbuWeb, founded by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, is an online archive of avant-garde art, poetry, film, and sound — running without institutional affiliation, without budget, without copyright permissions, without advertising, on Goldsmith's personal server for nearly three decades. The site holds thousands of films, hundreds of thousands of texts, complete sound archives of major twentieth-century avant-garde figures. It is, by a significant margin, the largest unauthorized avant-garde archive on the internet. UbuWeb's relationship to copyright law is adversarial and principled. Goldsmith has said consistently that he will continue hosting materials until a rights-holder sends a takedown notice, and in the rare cases this has happened, he has complied quickly. Most rights-holders have never asked. The result is an archive that persists in a legal gray zone, providing researchers, teachers, and curious visitors with access to materials they could not otherwise find. What UbuWeb argues — through its long continuity — is that the institutional art world's assumptions about provenance, authorization, and access are partial. There exists a parallel archive, built without institutional support, that is more complete and more accessible than any officially-sanctioned collection. Goldsmith's refusal to seek permission is the work's conceptual frame. UbuWeb is directly continuous with the web-as-archive tradition that Rhizome would later institutionalize. It is, in structural position, the web's most important non-institutional art archive. Lore Kenneth Goldsmith launched UbuWeb from a graduate-student office at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 with a single hosted index of avant-garde audio files; the site has run continuously since, on Goldsmith's personal funds, for nearly thirty years. He has refused every grant, sponsorship, and institutional partnership that has been offered, on the explicit principle that the moment UbuWeb accepts external money it becomes vulnerable to external editorial pressure. Goldsmith holds a permanent post as a senior editor at PennSound and teaches in Penn's English department; the day jobs subsidize the archive. His wife Cheryl Donegan, the painter and video artist, has been UbuWeb's de facto curator for several decades, with no formal title and no compensation. The archive's roughly 7,000 audio and video items are stored across a deliberately modest collection of cheap servers. Sources • UbuWeb (ubu.com) • Goldsmith, Kenneth — Uncreative Writing (Columbia University Press, 2011) • Rhizome — UbuWeb profile