bookofjoe

UbuWeb

Res ipsa loquitur.

Excerpts from About UbuWeb*:

Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts.

By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission.

Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted.

We've never been sued — never even come close.

UbuWeb functions on no money — we don’t take it, we don't pay it, we don't touch it; you'll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box.

Most important, UbuWeb has always been and will always be free and open to all: there are no memberships or passwords required.

UbuWeb is visited daily by tens of thousands of people from every continent.

The site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists better known for other things.

UbuWeb is a purposely unstable library, a conflicted curation, an archive assembled by embracing the fragmented, the biased, the subjective, and the incomplete.

We've never done much to encourage an online community.

Instead, we preferred the quieter model of the public library, a large repository of cultural artifacts waiting to be browsed, borrowed, and shared.

Whereas we once used to receive daily cease-and-desist letters, today we rarely get any.

It's not that we’re doing anything different; it's just that people’s attitudes toward copyright and distribution have evolved as the web has evolved.

By the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone.

Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our internet service provider (ISP) pulls the plug, we get sued, or we simply grow tired of it.

We don't run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; more often than not, the already small group of volunteers dwindles to a team of one.

UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise even ourselves.

*Excerpted & adapted from Duchamp is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb

Fair warning: there goes the rest of the weekend.

Transform Your Hoodie into a Computer Sleeve

Genius.

Tip: Play the video at quarter- or half-speed.

bookofjoe's Favorite Thing: Rubbermaid Brilliance Storage Containers

I've been using these for years now and they continue to excel.

Clear plastic with rubber seals that really close down tightly, so much so that sometimes I have to work to open them.

The seals get stronger with time, which I find remarkable.

Lagniappe: though they look like they'd crack and break when dropped several feet onto a hard tile floor, they don't.

Wide range of sizes and shapes here.