A short essay on the structural and editorial commitments of Ubu Web, unpacking the genesis of its focus on sharing and historical revisionism in terms of its willful anti-copyright politics. Commissioned to mark the 20th birthday of the world's biggest free online archive of avant-garde culture.
From the article:
"What connects Goldsmith’s writing and web-editing practices is more fundamentally signalled by the archive's URL. Alfred Jarry was the proto-avant-garde shooting star par excellence and author of a trilogy of Ubu plays, of which the first, Ubu Roi (1896), served as exemplar of Jarry's absurdist mock-science, 'pataphysics, which had an inestimable influence on the 20th-century's avant-gardes. 'Pataphysics can be roughly described as a science of imaginary answers to imaginary questions. The formal, compositional gesture of both Goldsmith's Conceptual Writing and UbuWeb is 'pataphysical. His two lines of work just imagine different answers to the same imaginary question: what if copyright didn't exist?"
