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Tomislav Medak 2023-11-05 13:38:10 -08:00
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title = "Everything Is Temporary" title = "Everything Is Temporary"
glassblowers = ["custodiansonline.md", "marcellmars.md", "tomislavmedak.md"] glassblowers = ["custodiansonline.md", "marcellmars.md", "tomislavmedak.md", "mckenziewark.md", "aaronswartz.md"]
has_reflections = ["placeholder.md"] has_reflections = ["avantgarde.md", "shadowlibraries.md", "technologicalresilience.md", "autonomouscustodianship.md"]
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# Ambient Marcel Duchamp, one of the founders of avant-garde, in 1935 at the Councours Lépine, an innovation fair, exhibited a series of objects under titled *Rotoreliefs* - twelve cardboard litography discs with spiral motifs in the lithography technique. When rotating *Rotoreliefs* would engender optical illusions. Although he received an honorable mention in the category of industrial art for his exhibit, the product itself turned out to be unsuccessful: he sold two discs to friends and one to a visitor. Duchamp initially produced 500 sets of *Rotoreliefs*, of which 300 disappeared in the Second World War, while rare examples were preserved for posterity.
First, we are building an ambient, a (fictional) room filled with bookshelves. In that room, whenever you reach for a book, it is immediately clear why that book is there. It's a place where you could easily lose yourself by following a reference from some specific part of our collective publication. Or you could start by sitting inside the library and lose yourself in exploring all of the references on surrounding bookshelves. At Interliber, a book fair, we are exhibiting the electronic publication *Ubu@50*. UbuWeb (ubu.com) is the largest online archive of avant-garde art. The electronic publication *Ubu@50* contains texts about UbuWeb, a digital library of references used in the texts and a complete archive of UbuWeb.
That's how we build a catalog. A bibliography. [A library](/library/BROWSE_LIBRARY.html). Something UbuWeb celebrated its 25th birthday two years ago. Since the advent of the Internet as a global mass medium, the American conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith himself, using rudimentary HTML code and without asking permission, has collected, organized and provided access to otherwise difficult-to-access works of experimental film, video art, contemporary theater, conceptual poetry and concrete music. Years before museums and archives of contemporary art began to digitize material from their depots, Ubu was a place to discover important works of cultural history and potentially the cultural future. However, in times of digital platforms, surveillance and intellectual property restrictions, precious archives like Ubu can disappear overnight. As Custodians.online once wrote in a birthday card for Ubu's 20th:
like: https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/,
https://monoskop.org/log2/ or https://aaaaarg.fail.
Building that library will be as easy as sending a reference – an article, a book, a webpage - to a chat room (https://t.me/+xFYiBlTfBrhkZjI0), via an email to ![me](glassblower:marcellmars.md) or ![Tomi](glassblower:tomislavmedak.md), or adding it to a page at https://git.sandpoints.org/CustodiansOnline/MirrorUbu > Everything is temporary, even after 20 years. Servers crash, disks die, life changes and shit happens. Care and redundancy is the only path to longevity.
Our collective publication emerges from that initial sharing of texts and thoughts, building a three-level hierarchy of written documents: In the greeting card, we, people who care, are invited to find our own Ubu. The fragility of precious archives requires us to mirror each other in solidarity. Distributed technologies are solid in automating the allocation of resources in the world of corporate services. However, in that world, the fate of the shared resources is destined to depend on technological giants. The resilient shared archives that we care about are, on the contrary, distributed with simple gestures and technologies that have served us for decades. Distributed networks of services need machines, distributed networks of cultural artifacts need people. Therefore, those who care will bring a 3TB hard drive and at Interliber will get a chance to copy a mirror of Ubu to that drive. By Ubu's fiftieth we should have fifty mirrors!
# Shards With Ubu@50, we ask what the future should look like to allow Ubu and other autonomous digital archives to survive over the next quarter of a century. What kind of future can we imagine for avant-gardes under the conditions of ubiquitous digital infrastructures, intensive application of artificial intelligence and technological responses to social and ecological crises? And vice versa, what kind of future can we imagine for societies from the perspective of sustainable use of technologies, radical avant-garde gestures and the commons as they were created in digital culture over the previous quarter of a century?
A lot of us approach the task of writing a text first by jotting down some notes. Those notes often have references to items in the catalog/bibliography. Notes relate to each other. More often than not, notes get dropped, with the hope they might better serve us in the future in another process of writing.
We like to understand our notes as [shards](/shard/index.html). Shared shards. Shards collected/curated together build a reflection. We encourage editing someone else's shard or picking it up for your own reflection(s). Collective writing is hard but such guestures could help. That's our hope at least.
# Reflections
[Reflections](/reflection/index.html) collect shards and build upon them. A reflection is a work in progress, a bit more articulate than a shard. A short essay if you want.
# Mirror
![](mirror:ubu.md). It's a single document describing our endeavour. A mirror is gradually built from reflections which are built from shards. This process is neither linear nor unidirectional. A shard could come from a spark kindled by a sentence being written in the mirror document or from a reflection. Forget about spark. This is the moment where metaphorical starts to ruin its purpose.
We have a software platform which transforms this metaphorical play into a literal one. It is called [Sandpoints](https://pages.sandpoints.org/sandpoints/simplesandpoints-de47f813/draft/portfolio/). But let's forget about software for now. It will come in handy only when we need to accelerate what we agreed upon and set as our collective common ground. And for that we need to waste some time together. We couldn't imagine a better place than a renaissance palace on the island of Cres. Once we are all in Cres you will totally get what we think by this ;)