Underskog

Avant-garde culture may not, strictly speaking, be information, but
it, too, wants to be free or so goes the thinking at UbuWeb.com.
The site, founded in 1996 by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, is an
archive of experimental material so wide-ranging that to call it
“extensive” is like saying the ocean is “big.” It streams hundreds of
films and videos, from Man Ray’s 1928 film “L’Etoile de Mer” to “Man
Ray-Man Ray,” William Wegman’s 1978 mockumentary about his dog, and
hosts thousands of hours of sound, including recordings of Gertrude
Stein, Marcel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Salvador Dali, and
Jean-Luc Godard. Most of the sound files are MP3s, but the site notes
that “when a recording is still in print and available, we only serve
it in streaming RealMedia; we don’t wish to take whatever small
profits might be made from those taking the efforts to gather,
manufacture and properly distribute such recordings.” UbuWeb is as
much about the legal and social ramifications of its self-created
distribution and archiving system as it is about the content hosted
on the site. In a sense, the content takes care of itself; but
keeping it up there has proved to be a trickier proposition. The
socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with
unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by
darts thrown at Ubu by individuals calling foul-play on copyright
infringement. Undeterred, Ubu keeps on: after fifteen years, they’re
still going strong. Goldsmith will discuss the ins and outs of what
it means to be avant-garde.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “Sucking on Words” premiered at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. An anthology from Northwestern University Press that Goldsmith co-edited with Craig Dworkin, “Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” was just published and a book of critical essays, “Uncreative Writing,” is forthcoming this summer Columbia University Press.

Open Forum is a series of lectures, presentations, performances and conversations with artists, curators, theorists, authors, musicians etc. initiated and arranged by the Art Academy in Oslo. Open Forum usually take place every Monday at 19.00 in the Academy’s auditorium at Seilduken, Fossveien 24. Additional Open Forums might occur. The lectures are mainly executed in English and is ordinarily rounded up with questions and answers. The event is open for general public. Welcome!