Kenneth Goldsmith

We are all archivists!!

─ Hello? Banjo, get down, quiet, I’m sorry I can’t hear, the dog is barking.

─ Hold on I'll be right with you.

─ I’m Kenneth Goldsmith and I run UbuWeb since 1996. I’m also a writer, professor, and a troublemaker in general.  

─ So how you’ve been? Did you just get back? Drop the toilet paper. You’re making a mess. Drop it now. One second. UbuWeb was sort of born of when the internet was born, it began in 1996 as a site primarily for visual concrete and sound poetry and over the years it grew to become basically clearing center for avantgarde material and strange things that have no other place to be but there. 

UbuWeb from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Philosophy. Ubu web was founded in response to the marginal distribution of crucial avantgarde material. It remains noncommercial and operates on a gift economy. Ubu web ensures educational open access to out-of-print works that find a second life through digital art reprints, while also representing the work of contemporaries. It addresses problems in the distribution in the access to intellectual materials. 

─ Well, it is a giant archive (I don’t even know how much, I know there’s hundreds of thousands of things on that website), but we don’t really do anything different than we’ve ever really done it. There’s no database. It’s all basic HTML, like they used to be in the old days. So, it’s actually unsophisticated, it’s just a bunch of media and a bunch of links 

Distribution policy: UbuWeb does not distribute commercially viable works but rather resurrects avant-garde sound art, video and text full works for they translation into a digital art web environment recontextualizing them with current academic commentary and contemporary practice. 

─ I think today that we're all archivists, like archiving is the new vogue art, kind of when the people used kind of nit, or people used to collect strange things, stamps, or coins, today we collect say MP3s or videos or PDFs, you know, our hard drives are stuffed with more cultural artifacts that we’ll never be able to use, or listen to, or read, or watch, but we keep collecting them, just in case, which I really like. So now, I think everybody is an archivist now, with digital media. 

[Red Shadow (The Economics Rock & Roll Band). Understanding Marx (1975)]

─So I did a radio show on WFMU for 15 years, from around the time UbuWeb started (I think it was about 1995 when I started with WFMU), UbuWeb started in 1996, and I stayed in WFMU until 2010.  And in that time, UbuWeb and WFMU where kind of like the same thing. During the radio show, I would be taking CDs and ripping them for UbuWeb because we had so many incredible music CDs in the library. 

[The Cheese Band. I like Cheese (19??, home recording)]

─ And then WFMU also supported UbuWeb really early on, they gave us server space, I mena, the whole ethos of UbuWeb comes from WFMU, and WFMU was a free form radio station, where you can’t really keep a theme, you have to do a mix of all sorts of things and somehow come them cohere in some way. And that was really influential to the philosophy of UbuWeb. My work at WFMU and my work at UbuWeb happened at the same time. 

[Stu Apaker. Jumps From Two Feet (2007)]

─ UbuWeb would be very very different if WFMU wasn’t involved. Now, the 365 days project which I really love and I didn't even know that most people even know about it, it’s a collection from a guy called Otis Fodder, who was a sort just a strange guy hanging around WFMU like so many strange people collecting really weird things and WFMU gave Otis back in those days 2007, gave him a blog in order to house his collection, and so he put up one weird track every day for a year a then he did it again for a second time I think a few years later. 

[Jimmy Mitchell. Eres tú (2007)]

─ The problem with the blog Is that it doesn’t stay forever: people lose the URL, people lose... it breaks in a funny way, blogs go away. So I said to Otis, let’s put it on WFMU because I thought that it really addressed a lot of the artists that are on UbuWeb. There was a great cross section between outsiders and visionaries and poets that Otis was collecting and thet’t on WFMU, so it turns out that people can be known for one thing by some weird group of people and then it can also be in a museum, and the people that are into weird music don’t know that these things also exist in the museums. So, it was a beautiful way of breaking down the boundaries and it’s a very important part of UbuWeb. 

[The Blink Kids. Track 2 (199?, home recording)]

─ All the outsider the kind of stuff that I would use call It sane (maybe that’s not such a good word anymore) but we’re making a book of all these street poets and visionaries, is called Poesie brute, street poets and visionaries from the UbuWeb collections. That’s going to be a really beautiful book coming next year from a publisher friend. 

[Allen Ginsberg. Green Automobile 1953 (1972)]

─ I’ve been collecting thins from the streets of New York that are absolutely crazy. Again, it’s weird people writing things, mad men writing thing son the walls, bu to me also look like concrete poetry, so I’m interested in all of those boundaries. 

The computer speaks in accents almost completely humans, except for a slight electronic twang. In the following sentence, most of the variables inherent in human speech have been specified in the punch cards. The computer makes one of the pivotal remarks in the development of the telephone.

─ Well, I don’t like the internet anymore. I don’t like what it’s become, I hate social media. I hate the Internet now. But UbuWeb, the Internet will change and do whatever It’s going to do, but UbuWeb will always satay the same. It’s always 1996 on Ubuweb. It's always your adolescent son of the web, that will just never change. And the thing with internet... You can think that the internet it’s all Instagram and it’s all Facebook, but Ubuweb still exists there, it doesn’t... Just because Facebook is most of the internet, or Instagram is most of the internet, that doesn’t mean that sites like WFMU or UbuWeb don’t have plalce anymore. They’re the same as they’ve always been. I tend to ignore the rest of the internet. I can almost stick around UbuWeb. I think it’s healthier. 

[Kenneth Goldsmith. Sings Jean Baudrillard (2006)]