#ubuweb

[postpunkindustrial]

UbuWeb a website I have used many many times. Is back.

Check them out www.ubu.com

[garadinervi]

UbuWeb, «[…] 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.», February 1, 2025

«A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, 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. It's now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.» ― UbuWeb (Founded 1996)

[werkboileddown]

UbuWeb Founded 1996

February 1, 2025 A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, 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. It's now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.

[gregdotorg]

Is Ubu closed?

Download whatever you can, Ubu's been up more than it's been down, but it is not possible that it will be there forever.

as Kenneth Goldsmith has always said, including as recently as yesterday, "Don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future."

Three hours after also saying, "Let's keep UbuWeb well alive!" which, what

[losbigotesdegato]

As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety. 

Se trata del mayor repositorio de arte de vanguardia en línea: UbuWeb. Fundado en 1996 por el poeta Kenneth Goldsmith, esta biblioteca pirata alberga cientos de miles de obras de avanzada de todos los campos expresivos, una fuente de consulta inagotable para creadores, investigadores y curiosos de las formas marginales de expresión ( Revista La Tempestad 21 de mzo de 2024)

[teledyn]

Another one bites the dust: as of 2024 UbuWeb is no longer active. It will remain, for now, as an archive.

[rh0mbus0fruin]

digital horror fans when I show them Genesis (1988/1991) by Peter Rose on ubuweb

[whifferdills]

can i get a criterion merce cunningham videodance box set please pretty pleease

[mosertone]

Ed Sanders

Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts was a literary magazine founded in 1962 by the poet Ed Sanders on the Lower East Side of New York City. Sanders later co-founded the musical group the Fugs. Sanders produced thirteen issues of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts from 1962 to 1965.

[garadinervi]

From: Johanna Drucker, Stochastic Poetics, Druckwerk and Granary Books, New York, NY, 2012 [© Johanna Drucker]

(UbuWeb, Visual Writing, ubu editions, 2013, pdf here)

[canticleofcanticlesforleibowitz]

[jkottke]

UbuWeb, a pirate library of avant-garde artifacts, closed in 2024. But last month, they started the site back up again. “Archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression.”

[dizzymoods]

Lots of VC questions recently. Someone emailed about what they should be engaging with to develop their artistic voice. Here's my answer:

In terms of guidance, Werner Herzog, who is admittedly a weirdo, said that the best thing a film student can do is go backpacking cross country, which I would never do. But the point he was ultimately making is that life experience is more important than anything a film school can teach you. Your artistic voice develops more sharply the more intune you are with the world; all the film stuff is superfluous really. So that would be my major advice. Live life! Be open to all sorts of experiences.

Outside of that I would say to read and watch anything and everything you can get your hands on. Especially stuff that has nothing to do with film. Be curious, which is to say non-judgemental. Sitting through stuff that you have no interest in or actively hate is good! It develops your taste in ways that seeking out only what you like can never do. It also expands your horizons and teaches you how much you actually don't know about anything. Keeps you humble. You'll be surprised 5 years on how something that you had no interest in is super relevant to what you're trying to do.

I'll drop some recommendations later but something you are going to run into is paywalls and exorbitant costs. Scihub, Libgen, and PaywallReader can be your friends in this regard. The more niche something is, the less mirrors there are. Investing in an internet audio/video ripper is essential. Rip often and indiscriminately. Nothing is safe unless you triplicate it. And if you can't afford hard drives, dummy alphabet accounts are the next best thing. Also, footnotes and reference lists are treasure troves of breadcrumbs.

The standard VC reading list includes: Reel to Real, The Devil Finds Work, Playing in the Dark, Young British & Black, Ways of Seeing (also a documentary), Orientalism, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Culture, Questions of Third Cinema, Hollywood & Counter Cinema, Figures Traced in Light, Parallel Tracks, and Basho: The Complete Haiku

Hundreds of films can be found on Solidarity Cinema. Cinema of the World has a deep archive but you need to have space and a nitrofile account to download most films, but you can snipe a few films here and there (or look for them elsewhere). Rarefilmm updates semi-regularly and you can stream the films; they are now more active on twitter and are even taking requests. Some state-sponsored film industries have robust presences on youtube with english subs: Russia's Mosfilm/FUSE Mosfilm, Canada's NFB, the Korean Film Archive, Native People's Media. There's UbuWeb for all your avant-garde needs. There's FIlmmaker's Co-Op (pay-per-view), Paper Tiger Television, and Deep Dish Television for NYC indie stuff. AfroMarxist has a fair amount of political documentaries. NMAHC has an archive that houses the work of Chamba Productions and some of Pearl Bowser's stuff. And of course there's the legendary MikeD of ReelBlack. It's a crap shoot but some filmmakers and/or their estates make work available free online (Leo Hurwitz and Julie Dash come to mind). I'd recommend a Kweli TV subscription for black film, and never be surprised by what you can find on youtube or tubi!

This is probably super overwhelming but the joy of being an autodidact is the thrill of discovery so peruse at your leisurely interest. The internet is your oyster if you know how to use it! Back in my day hardly any of these sites existed and the ones that did weren't as robust as they are now. I've had to frankenstein whole movies from various clips posted in 144p on youtube 😩

I used to do a couple of themed months a year where I'd read and watch as much as possible about a filmmaker, genre, or movement that interested me. I'd spin a globe to learn a little about a random country's cinema. Best of lists/canons don't really mean much but they are good sources of stuff to at least be aware of.

[kaanozer]

If asked to explain the art movement known as Dada, I’d feel tempted to quote Louis Armstrong on the music movement known as jazz: “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.” But maybe I’d do better to sit them down in front of the half-hour documentary The ABCs of Dada. They may still come away confused, but not quite so deeply as before — or maybe they’ll feel more confused, but in an enriched way.

Even the video, which gets pretty thorough about the origins of and contributors to Dada, quotes heavily from the relevant Wikipedia article in its description, framing the movement as “a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.” They came to the conclusion that “reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and irrationality.” So there you have it; don’t try to understand.

Perhaps you remember that vintage Onion article, “Republicans, Dadaists Declare War on Art,” satirizing, among other things, the way proponents of Dada called its fruit not art, but ��anti-art.” They made it deliberately meaningless where “real” art strove to deliver messages, deliberately offensive where it strained to appeal to common sensibilities. The ABCs of Dada examines Dada through a great many of these Dadaists themselves, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a teacher and dancer forced to wear a mask for her Dada activities due to the group’s scandalous reputation in the academy; architect Marcel Janco, who remembers of the group that “among us were neither blasé people nor cynics, actors nor anarchists who took the Dada scandal seriously”; and “Dada-marshal” George Grosz, who declared that “if one calls my work art depends on whether one believes that the future belongs to the working class.” You can find further clarification among UBUweb’s collection of Dada, Surrealism, & De Stijl Magazines, such as Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and Berlin’s Der Dada. Or perhaps you’ll find further obfuscation, but that aligns with the Dada spirit — in a world that has ceased to make sense, so the Dadaists believed, the duty falls to you to make even less.

Source: https://www.openculture.com/2014/08/the-abcs-of-dada.html