UbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for
avant-gardeAvant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet
Kenneth GoldsmithKenneth Goldsmith is an American poet. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PennSound. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010...
. It offers visual, concrete and
sound poetrySound poetry is an artistic form bridging between literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words"...
, expanding to include
filmA film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
and
sound artSound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....
mp3MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
archives.
Philosophy
UbuWeb was founded in response to the marginal distribution of crucial
avant-gardeAvant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
material. It remains
non-commercialNon-commercial refers to an activity or entity that does not in some sense involve commerce, at least relative to similar activities that do have a commercial objective or emphasis...
and operates on a
gift economyIn the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...
. UbuWeb ensures educational open access to out-of-print works that find a second life through
digital artDigital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
reprint while also representing the work of contemporaries. It addresses problems in the distribution of and access to intellectual materials.
Distribution Policy
UbuWeb does not distribute commercially viable works but rather resurrects
avant-gardeAvant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
sound artSound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....
,
videoVideo is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
and textual works through their translation into a
digital artDigital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
web environment - re-contextualising them with current academic commentary and contemporary practice. It houses and distributes freely the entire archive of the
Tellus Audio Cassette MagazineLaunched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time...
project.
Content
Beyond its repository of works, UbuWeb features curated sections including
/ubu Editions book-length editions of contemporary
poetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, selected and introduced by the poet Brian Kim Stefans.
UbuWeb: Ethnopoetics, curated by
Jerome RothenbergJerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
, is fusing the avant-garde with traditional ethnic practices.
UbuWeb: Papers a series of contextual academic essays.
UbuWeb:Outsiders considers the legitimization of Outsider works and features
The 365 Days Project curated by Otis Fodder.
Infrastructure
UbuWeb is not affiliated to any academic institution, instead relying on alliances of interest and benefiting from bandwidth donations from its partnerships with
GreyLodge,
WFMUWFMU is a listener-supported, independent community radio station headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States, broadcasting at 91.1 MHz FM, presenting a freeform radio format...
, PennSound, The Electronic Poetry Center, The Center for Literary Computing, and ArtMob.
UbuWeb's board of directors includes the poets
Charles BernsteinCharles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American...
,
Darren Wershler-HenryDarren Wershler aka Darren Wershler-Henry is a Canadian experimental poet, non-fiction writer and cultural critic.A former grave digger, he was the senior editor of Coach House Books between 1997 and 2002, where the works he edited included several highly acclaimed books of contemporary innovative...
and critic
Marjorie PerloffMarjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
.
External links
Articles