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Tomislav Medak 2024-05-19 13:19:22 -07:00
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title = "An Autonomous Archive"
glassblowers = ["cristobalsciutto.md"]
has_shards = ["exuberance.md", "redundancy.md", "infinite-use-of-finite-means.md", "conviviality.md", "maintenance.md", "enshittification.md", "autonomous-life.md", "analogies.md", "difference.md", "exuberance.md", "conviviality.md", "mediating-difference.md", "interface.md", "custodianshipinrelationalpractices.md"]
has_shards = ["exuberance.md", "redundancy.md", "infinite-use-of-finite-means.md", "conviviality.md", "maintenance.md", "enshittification.md", "autonomouslife.md", "analogies.md", "difference.md", "exuberance.md", "conviviality.md", "mediating-difference.md", "interface.md", "custodianshipinrelationalpractices.md"]
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The fundamental tension of the archive is between ![exuberance](shard:exuberance.md) and ![compression](shard:redundancy.md). Exuberance is not a consequence of hoarding, an accumulation of junk. Only a naive understanding of archiving prioritizes scale over information, after all, a lot of the same is not much at all. Analogously, compression is not merelythe manipulation of symbols as to find a denser representation of information.
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As object of study, few are as interesting to consider as [UbuWeb](https://ubu.com). While physical archives and libraries have existed
for much longer, UbuWeb is both digital and conterminous with the existence of the internet. As such, it is built on a radically different substrate to oral traditions or printed matter, one that in different moments of its history has appeared both utopian ("information wants to be free") and dystopian ("information is stuck on ![enshittified](shard:enshittification.md) platforms"). Further, it supervenes on top of networks of actors distributed across the planet, rather than spatially cloistered.
UbuWeb began as part of the utopian impulse of the internet, and has since evolved to become an ![autonomous](shard:autonomous-life.md) resource: infrastructure that others depend on and help maintain, in an attempt to guarantee for each other the means for an autonomous life. A quarter century into its existence, it becomes critical to ask: what is necessary for UbuWeb to survive another quarter century?
UbuWeb began as part of the utopian impulse of the internet, and has since evolved to become an ![autonomous](shard:autonomouslife.md) resource: infrastructure that others depend on and help maintain, in an attempt to guarantee for each other the means for an autonomous life. A quarter century into its existence, it becomes critical to ask: what is necessary for UbuWeb to survive another quarter century?
And so the story began... Sitting at his desk, with a glass of whiskey at hand, Ken Goldsmith ripped, scanned, and torrented art to add to his collection on UbuWeb. It was performance art, an act of *uncreative writing*. I can hear his voice in my head, paraphrasing a conversation with Tom McCarthy — "It's our dirty secret, the one people try to hide: all writing is patchwork." We've killed the author, and with them intellectual property. Plagiarism? Ill-defined. The ![ecstasy of influence](bib:39ea44c2-b813-4c22-9564-42315a355edf) overruns pretences of originality. (I picture Joyce, blinded in one eye, nearly so in the other, mumbling in sing-song, scribbling fragments, as Beckett reads to him the entry on Dublin from an encyclopedia.) The fundamental aesthetic act has always been selection: ![this not that](shard:analogies.md).