The other day I went to look for something on UbuWeb and I saw this message, which was not there the last time I’d checked. It seems as though the platform has stopped being updated, but the content will continue to live as an archive. Even so, I will be downloading materials to my hard drive, because this sheds light on just how precarious content’s life on the internet really is, especially for something like UbuWeb, which calls itself a “pirate shadow library.”
To quote from the “manifesto” on Ubu’s About page:
“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.”
This text is adapted from Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2020 book Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb. Goldsmith writes about how the ethos of UbuWeb is always already situated within the politics of the internet, where avant-garde art and poetry must, in order to be shared for educational purposes, operate within the shadowy grey area of copyright law. The reality is, UbuWeb is a crucial resource for finding avant-garde works that otherwise don’t exist online. The democratizing pledge of Ubu is to keep these works barrier-free for any student, teacher, artist, poet, or curious individual. Long live Ubu!!!!
