Ubu@50 – 50 Ubus¶
UbuWeb (ubu.com) is arguably the largest web archive of avant-garde art. In 2021 Ubu turned 25. For about the same time the Internet has been a mass medium on a global scale, the US American conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith has alone, using the simplest HTML code, collected, organized and made available to anyone otherwise inaccessible works of experimental cinema, video art, contemporary theatre and concrete music. Years before museums and archives had started to digitize the collections from their vaults, Ubu made possible the discovery of works that have played an important role in cultural history, or could play that role in the future. However, in the present times of digital platforms, dataveillance and copyright, control valuable archives such as Ubu can disappear overnight. In 2024 Ubu has ceased adding new items to its collection and transformed into an archive preserved hopefully in perpetuity.
With Ubu@50 we wanted to open a debate on what can we envision as acts and developments that would allow for Ubu and other autonomous digital archives to persist and thrive for another quarter of a century. What futures could we imagine for the avant-garde starting from several processes that define our present moment: the ubiquity of digital infrastructures, the intensive application of artificial intelligence, and the privileging of technological responses to social and environmental crises? And in turn, what futures can we imagine for societies starting from the resilient use of technologies, radical avant-garde gestures and practices of commoning that have emerged over the last quarter of a century from the critical media cultures?
Everything is Temporary¶
The title of this experimental hyperlinked publication, “Mirror Stage: Everything is Temporary”, takes its inspiration from Kenneth Goldsmith’s bib⁄Duchamps is My Lawyer:
And in 2024, Kenneth finally threw in the towel and decided to no longer continue adding to UbuWeb’s collection and make it an archive. With this book we wanted to envision what would it take to ensure that Ubu and other autonomous digital archives can endure and thrive over the next quarter of a century – as they have over the last quarter of a century. The publication is an excercise in collective writing and integrates contributed texts and functions as an interface to a disk-based mirror of the UbuWeb archive. By creating mirrors, we build resilience for such archives.
This publication was collectively written by twelve “glassblowers”: Felix Stalder, Sanja Bojanić, Srećko Horvat, Aleksndra Savanović, Nick Thurston, Alessandro Ludovico, Dušan Barok, Olga Goriunova, Cristóbal Sciutto, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak.
The Structure of the Publication¶
Glassblowers they are called as this publication plays with the metaphor of a mirror. Metaphorically, a mirror generates reflections, reflections are composed of fragmentary apparitions we have called shards. Consequently, the hierarchy of this hyperlinked publication is that it is a mirror containing a number of reflections. Reflections are your best entry points into our writing endavour. Sometimes they resemble traditional essays, sometimes they are conceptual texts, each written by a glassblower.
The list of all reflections you will find on the top of this page.
Each reflection references and links to a number of shards – fragments of writing, references and notes that revolve around the central concern of “Everything is Temporary”. As you start to wind your way through the shards, a kaleidoscope of near-future thinking opens up to you.
“Ubu@50 – 50 Ubus” was organized within Multimedia Institute’s “Public Library” programme. It was developed within the “Peripheral Visions – towards a trans(l)national publishing culture” project, a partnership between EIPCP, Kontrapunkt, Kuda.org, Kulturtreger, Maska and Multimedia Institute, funded by the European Union.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
