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»A Community Service«

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Seems like most of the interesting projects i do interviews with i get to know by chance. This time it was some filesharing community where i came across with the movies of Guy Debord (Situationist International). The filename had »Ubu.com« in brackets and this is how i heard of UbuWeb for the first time. UbuWeb features so many great and interesting things and i was like: »Woaaah, why didn’t i get to know about it earlier?!« This Interview was done with Kenneth, as always via email. By Peter Stack

Where’s your Punk-Attitude coming from?
There’s a great correspondence between the work we feature on UbuWeb and the DIY punk scene in terms of community and radical notions of decentralized distribution. Mail art would be another important precedent for UbuWeb’s attitude. Avant-garde sound works — as well as poetry, visual & concrete poetry, etc. — have never had any great commercial value and as such, they beg to be given away and shared amongst the very small community of people who are interested in these things, very much like early punk rock. Also, the media materials featured on UbuWeb were generally self-produced in small numbers and made their way through a certain underground, very similar to punk and early independent music, of course the difference being that instead of the cranky record shop on the corner dealing the stuff, it’s now available online for free. But it’s still very underground and you need to know someone or something about what you’re looking for in order to locate it. So, although we’re digital, things really haven’t changed much.

Another correspondence might be the refusal of authority since you don’t ask for permission to make certain stuff available online.
Sure. A corollary of the DIY/punk ethos is that an individual’s intellectual property is entrusted to a community as a shared resource for education, entertainment, etc. — a cultural resource — and that this community, in turn, will be trusted not to abuse or commercialize the product. On UbuWeb, we sell nothing; instead it’s given away to an interested community. Also, we won’t post material that is in print; we wish for those willing to take the risk of packaging and distributing these materials to profit, no matter how meager that profit might be. But if it’s out of print, we consider it a community service to return it to circulation without permission. However, if an artist wishes to have their work removed from the site, we gladly remove it, but this rarely happens. Instead, we get folks sending us more materials for distribution on UbuWeb. It’s become so high profile that many artists feel it necessary to be represented here in some way.

Might be different if you wouldn´t have so many clicks a day.
Well, it wasn’t always this way. UbuWeb has been around for ten years now and what started off as a repository for only visual and concrete poetry has grown to embrace all aspects of the avant-garde (whatever that may mean as the meaning of avant-garde is always morphing). I foresee UbuWeb as growing more in this expanded field of the avant-garde to the point where if one is curious about anything vaguely associated with the avant-garde, UbuWeb is the place on the web to look first. The site already includes texts, images, film and audio; I see it expanding to include all disciplines, growing to include dance and theatre.

On your website you mentioned that if stuff is available only for insane prices or can hardly be found (but still in print) you’d make it available on Ubu.com, too.
Well, we’re sort of Robin Hoods of the avant-garde. We pluck things off of file sharing that are available to only a few folks who are enabled with such privileged technology and access and make this material available to anyone with a high-speed web connection. While we do generally traffic in the out-of-print and unavailable, we do occasionally make a protest to what we conceive of as profiteering off the avant-garde — those who offer humble materials for ridiculous prices, thus ostensibly rendering it unavailable to a common viewership.

Can you gimme an example of something you made available in an act of protest?
Actually, I’d rather not.

Did you ever get in trouble with THE LAW by doing what you are doing?
No. When requested, we apologize and remove the offending work, which is seems to be enough. You must remember that because the materials we’re dealing with don’t generate any real revenue for anybody, most copyright holders don’t have any money with which to come after us.

How do you decide what will be made available online on UbuWeb? Do you discuss the material in advance or just put online whatever you get your hands on (& belongs to the avant-garde)? I’m thinking of that Otto Muehl film. I read some strange stuff about him being kind of the leader of a commune that had »fuck plans« and these plans included the children as well. He got in trouble with the law ’cos of this, too.
It is wholly up to the editors to decide what appears in the respective sections they edit. Much of it comes our way via file sharing and, yes, if it’s avant, then it stands a better chance of being included, particularly in the film section, which doesn’t have an editor and instead is rather a collection of what we come across either by file sharing or what is sent to us by our viewers (we’re always getting packages in the mail or yousendit.com chock full of films folks have either ripped or poached for us). In terms of morality, well, that’s a complicated discussion and suffice it to say that the greatest of artists have not always been exemplary human beings.

And the perception of what a »great artist« is might change, too.
So, you avoid any kind of judgement. I’m not trying to nail you down on this one, but Otto Muehl was sentenced to 7 years for rape and abuse of under-age persons. I think this is kind of a serious thing you gotta deal with if you accumulate such a huge variety of material.
Absolutely not. We are not responsible for the actions of artists, we simply present their work. It is up to the viewer to decide if and how to use it. We don’t believe in censorship or moral valuation of any type.

Since »avantgarde« seems to be one of the main categories for you to decide if some material fits in Ubu, how would you define it and what makes the avantgarde so special?
The idea avant-garde is an idea that is constantly in flux and is redefining itself. As the site has grown over the past decade, so has the thrust of the site. We use avant-garde as a wide catch-all to include many things that might be construed as adventurous. For example, ten years ago, the outsider arts were not considered in a discussion of the avant-garde; today they are central. The margins turn inward and the inside moves out.

Do you think the avantgarde has some kind of a special mission, some counterbalance to society?
I do think that it provides an important antidote for the purposefulness of Western culture & the productivity of Capitalism. In the end, this might be the avant-garde’s greatest gift to us. Remember, poetry makes nothing happen. By invoking this condition on UbuWeb, a free and open space, we try to make a stand against the commercialization and business culture of the web.

But don’t you think that there’s some kind of a drawback cos most of the artists making their stuff available to UbuWeb might not be in the position to avoid the reproductive entirety. They rely on making a living. And cos of the many clicks UbuWeb has and the high density of material it represents it might be, from an economical point of few, a strategy for the artist to supply you with their work as some kind of an appetizer/advertisement for their work, a strategy that pays off in the end.
The sad reality is that artists who make innovative soundworks generally don’t make much of a living off their works alone. Instead the economic model tends toward the gift economy; distribution of their materials to a receptive audience is the end goal, not the monetary benefits. Sound poetry, for example — no one has ever made a living off of sound poetry. But there are other great side effects that come as a result of UbuWeb exposure.
I’ll tell you a funny story. A few years ago I was invited on a reading tour of Scandinavia. Complete expenses were paid for me and my family. I gave readings to packed houses and enthusiastic audiences; I was intereviewed for radio and television; the largest newspapers ran full features on my poetry. And now the punchline: no one in Scandinavia had ever seen a book of mine (I’ve published eight of them and have never made any money from them). The only way they knew about my works was from what they saw (and didn’t pay for) on the internet (UbuWeb). So, you see, many nice and unexpected things come from giving away your work on a highly visible site like UbuWeb.

Another comment i wanna make refers to this »free and open space« remark you made. This appears to be a false friend, UbuWeb might be free for the user, but still it costs money, time,… exists within the realm of capitalism.
Our economic structure is insanely simple: it costs me personally US$50 to pay my ISP a month. Our server space and bandwidth is all donated by universities for free. Hence, we’re in a position of great freedom. As for labor, it’s all volunteer. Yes, nothing is free of capital, but we try to stay as clear of it as we can.

»Concrete poetry« – you mentioned this already, what does it mean?
The concrete poets were a multi-national post-war movement who sought to create an internationally readable language by using iconographic and signatory language, rather like a visual Esperanto. Their auditory parallel were the sound poets. Leaders of the concrete poetry movement included the Augusto & Haroldo de Campos of Brazil and Eugen Gomringer of Switzerland. An extensive history of the movement is provided on UbuWeb in our Papers section.

When talking about the future of UbuWeb you mentioned dance and theatre as something you’d like to include as well. Are you thinking about videos of performances and what else can be expected from UbuWeb in future?
I believe that it will continue to grow enormously in the future. Right now — by comparison to what it will be in, say, five years — the site is very small. It is infinitely expandable in terms of bandwidth and storage space and will grow in whatever direction the avant-garde, the outre or the adventurous happens to take us.

Kenneth, thanx for doing this interview!

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