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Tomislav Medak 2024-05-19 13:20:31 -07:00
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@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ for much longer, UbuWeb is both digital and conterminous with the existence of t
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).
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.
An archive, in its purest, quasi-mathematical form, is the preservation of differences. Uniformity, a field of white noise, lacks information. All objects are identical to each other, indistinguishable. ![Difference](shard:difference.md) is what allows a concept to arise: the tracing of a line of topography on a paper defines a map that organizes our perceptions. If all possible lines were drawn, i.e. no selection was made, we would be no better than before. Good maps allow us to navigate complex terrain while reducing unnecessary noise. They select a finite number of differences that express the most information, that is, the largest amount of relevant options. As such, they are compendiums of
difference that make a difference.