UbuWeb returns

Paula Mejía in conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith.

In 1996, the poet Kenneth Goldsmith began uploading concrete and sound poetry files to the web, with an eye towards creating a repository of these genres online. He called it UbuWeb. Goldsmith’s small project gradually ballooned into a massive avant-garde trove of rare and often unusual art, bursting with thousands of media ranging from Romanian sculptor and painter Constantin Brâncuși’s rare forays into the moving image to the sounds of poet Jayne Cortez performing with her band, The Firespitters. 

While curated by Goldsmith himself, these selections—always free to watch or listen to—were grouped simply by medium and alphabetical order, which invited intrepid visitors to forge their own connections between disparate-seeming forms of art. On UbuWeb, you’ll find a 1957 recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Lady Be Good” alongside anthologies of the Fluxus art movement. No ads populate the site, nor do visitors receive an “allow cookies” notification. Aesthetically, it’s as ruthlessly no-frills as the nascent web era that birthed it. 

For decades, Goldsmith helmed UbuWeb by curating it himself. But a recent technical snafu (trying to get the website off commercial servers) led him to think it might be a natural stopping point for the longstanding left-field archive, which he considered more or less complete. It was time to log off, which he did in 2024. Yet about a month ago, UbuWeb returned with a message of urgency affixed to its homepage: “With the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard.” 

Since then, Goldsmith tells me, he’s been working with a team of white hat hackers to secure UbuWeb’s contents and readying it to meet this moment. On the heels of UbuWeb’s return, Dirt caught up with Goldsmith to chat about the practicalities of running a site outside of the mainstream, cultural archiving, and preparing for a “post-internet future.” 

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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