Actively growing is taken to be an archive’s sign of life.
By the same metaphor, inactivity must be deathly — archives grow or die. Projecting a mortal lifecycle on to an archive is a coping mechanism. It helps us to cope with the fact that things and structures, including archives, can neither live or die.
They just change in tow with patterns of attention and neglect. An archive is a structure that organises access to its holdings. Whether it is growing or not, it can still afford that access so long as its structures are at least maintained.
So, UBUweb has stopped growing but it is all still there. Its duree is not that of mortality but of a time-based performance — a subjective cultural gesture.
It was always a durational performance of gathering, organising and sharing; one that would last for as long as the act was sustainable and interesting.
In turn, UBUweb, like all artworks, has a quasi-subject status.
It bears characteristics — or their markers — that we associate with subjecthood.
It invites or inclines us to attend to it on terms that reinforce subjectivity: its, ours, the archivist’s, and the authors archived.
Like all ‘little databases’, UBUweb is flooded with subjectivity: tastes, identities, desires, capacities, and of course, limitations.
So there it is. Subject-like. But perfectly capable of affording things we cannot do or even yet imagine. A mirror and a prism on to subjectivity.