»We post a lot of things without permission; but we also post a lot of things with permission. That is why we permit you to help yourself to the content as desired, although in many cases we are not authorised to do so. We have simply done it – which is what you should do, too.« That is how the publishers of UbuWeb sum up their idea of content-sharing and the free flow of information. And so far it has worked amazingly well and without legal consequences. This, despite the fact that the countless gigabytes of material made available on the site are probably a copyright minefield, which is likely seen in a such a »defused« manner only because the content in question here comes from the sphere of the classical avant-garde or its continuation in the present. But the collection is all the more comprehensive and impressive because of this, particularly in view of the fact that there is scarcely another archive in the world that makes available, at a mouse click, films by Man Ray and Guy Debord or lectures by Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes.

UbuWeb was founded ten years ago as a forum for »concrete poetry«. Taking a lead from a dictum of Max Bense, who said that this genre was the first truly international literary movement, the initiators wanted to used the technical possibilities of the Net in precisely this light. A small project group associated with the author and professor of literature Kenneth Goldsmith (University of Pennsylvania) began to build up a platform where ideogrammatic texts and, subsequently, sound material, videos and even full-length films could be accessed. The constantly developing tools, Java, PDF (portable document format), MP3 or MPEG and AVI codes, make it possible to fulfil old avant-garde dreams in an almost excessive way – for example, to let the written word »roam and mutate, flow and scream, then finally make it available worldwide in the twinkling of an eye and at no great cost.« This is how the utopians of the Concrete Poetry movement had imagined things.

UbuWeb works basically as a »gift economy« - or as a remedy to global archival omissions, it could be added. Out-of-print books, magazines and records that have vanished from the shelves and can no longer be found even second-hand, films that are available (and then mostly with difficulty) only in a scant number of archives – the site offers all of this for research purposes. It is by no means a matter of shameless pirate copying per se, however – as soon as anyone objects to a posting, the incriminated item is immediately put offline – but rather of creating a »rhizomatic, four-dimensional >avant-space<«. Something that is continually supported and actively encouraged by artists and many other content suppliers, who make available their rarities and treasures free of charge. The aim is to make accessible »unbounded resources to an unlimited extent« without academic bureaucracy or commercial interests intervening and imposing restrictions.

UbuWeb contains twelve subsections that are constantly being extended: from the film archive, whose earliest treasure is Ladislav Starevicz’ animation »The Revenge of the Cameraman« from 1912, to a collection of primary texts on American and British conceptual art, to recordings of lectures and radio plays, the latter including the works Samuel Beckett produced for the BBC and Ferdinand Kriwet’s famous WDR works. However, these twelve interconnected platforms do not so much aspire to be self-serve stores ready for the plundering, as a real aid to finding what one wants. There is not much sense (or enjoyment) in scanning through the long lists of contents. However, if you concretely look for Otto Muehl’s 1970’s LP »Psycho Motorik«, which is hard to obtain second-hand: got it! The same goes for the seldom-heard cello performances by Charlotte Moorman, Robert Ashley’s series of interviews and concerts »Music with Roots in the Aether« (1976), and hundreds of other avant-garde works that are no longer to be found today.

The multimedia magazine »Aspen«, published between 1965 and 1971 by Phyllis Johnson, has a special place in the archive. This »magazine in a box« - among its famous issues are the »Pop Art Issue« designed by Andy Warhol and Quentin Fiore’s »McLuhan Issue« - contained more than just the written word and pictures: the issues were often accompanied by flexidiscs with exclusive sound-art pieces. Once there was even a Super-8 film with works by Hans Richter and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy. Forty years on, UbuWeb has worked these components up for a click-happy audience. The haptic or even fetishising approach that so often characterises the collection of rare finds may fall by the wayside. But perhaps this is even a welcome side effect of electronic re-editing: an anti-nostalgic »digi-material« approach to history.

http://www.ubu.com

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---