UbuWeb
Digital avant-garde art library
title: "UbuWeb" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["experimental-film-organizations", "internet-properties-established-in-1996", "american-literature-websites", "non-profit-organizations-based-in-the-united-states", "art-websites", "audiovisual-ephemera", "arts-organizations-established-in-1996"] description: "Digital avant-garde art library" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Digital avant-garde art library ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox website"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | UbuWeb |
| url | |
| commercial | no |
| type | Digital library |
| registration | none |
| language | English |
| editor | Kenneth Goldsmith |
| current_status | Online |
| :: |
| name = UbuWeb | url = | commercial = no | type = Digital library | registration = none | language = English | editor = Kenneth Goldsmith | current_status = Online
UbuWeb is a digital library of freely downloadable avant-garde art, film, music as well as visual, concrete and sound poetry. The site includes mp3 archives of early internet and sound art. The site was created by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996 to provide web-based educational resources to "a substantial user base." In the book Duchamp is my Lawyer:* *The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, Goldsmith notes that "it’s hard to say exactly who these users are since we don’t keep tabs on them."
In January 2024, UbuWeb announced it was no longer active, posting: "As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety". In February 2025 the site resumed its activities, citing the "political changes in America and elsewhere around the world" as a reason to be active again.
Philosophy
UbuWeb was founded in response to the marginal distribution of crucial avant-garde material. It remains non-commercial and operates on a gift economy. UbuWeb ensures educational open access to out-of-print works that find a second life through digital art 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-garde sound art, video and textual works through their translation into a digital art 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 Magazine project. In 2020, Kenneth Goldsmith wrote in his book Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of Ubuweb that “Perhaps no collection of audio inspired UbuWeb more than the Tellus cassettes….”
Content
Beyond its repository of works, UbuWeb features curated sections including /ubu Editions book-length editions of contemporary poetry, selected and introduced by the poet Brian Kim Stefans. UbuWeb: Ethnopoetics, curated by Jerome Rothenberg, fused the avant-garde with traditional ethnic practices. UbuWeb: Papers is 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, WFMU, PennSound, The Electronic Poetry Center, The Center for Literary Computing, and ArtMob.
References
References
- Brogan, Jacob. (December 23, 2016). "This Totally Weird, 20-Year-Old Website Collects the Forgotten and the Unfamiliar".
- (June 19, 2014). "Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media". Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
- "About UbuWeb".
- "About UbuWeb".
- "UbuWeb".
- Kirn, Peter. (2025-02-06). ""All rivers lead to the same ocean": UbuWeb, pirate shadow library, is back".
- (2001). "Ubuweb Wants to be Free (Open Letter)". State University of New York at Buffalo.
- [[Damon Krukowski]], "[http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/artforum.html Free Verses: Kenneth Goldsmith and UbuWeb]", ''[[Artforum]]'', March 2008
- Goldsmith, Kenneth. (2020). "Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb". Columbia University Press.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::