Review: UbuWeb, by Kenneth Goldsmith, et al.

Abstract

Kenneth Goldsmith, et al. UbuWeb, http://www.ubuweb.com. There is no question that contemporary technology has allowed for a massive redistribution of cultural works. Texts, music, and films have been transcoded and put into circulation on the internet reaching ever-broader audiences. Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand has been criticized for the way he phrased the idea that “information wants to be free” to Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer, in 1984.1 But in the context of the expanding internet, information has realized a kind of autonomy and tendency toward dispersion that points to H. G. Wells’s 1937 idea for a “world brain,” which might have “at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.”2 UbuWeb is an enormous online archive of avant-garde artworks, from poetry and conceptual writing, to sound and music, to film and video. The website is a careful exercise in collecting and listmaking: one is presented with general categories like Sound or Film & Video, together with precisely framed and introduced selections, such as Conceptual Writing presented by noted English literature scholar Craig Douglas Dworkin. There is a New Additions list of items shown by date and a collection of top ten lists, wherein various writers, artists, and curators mine the depths of the site’s contents. No matter how a viewer might reach a particular artwork, the experience of encountering that work is a critical matter. Little of UbuWeb’s content was created on the computer and even less was intended to be seen there. Moreover, the technologies embedded in web browsers have evolved since Ubu’s founding in 1996: initially the site delivered only formatted text in the form of a small collection of visual and concrete poetry from the personal archives of its founder, poet …