<nettime> Happy birthday, Ubu.com!

[nettime's care taker <nettime@kein.org>]

http://custodians.online/ubu/

Dear fellow custodian,

Ubu.com turns 20 this year. For about the same time the Internet
has been a mass medium on a global scale and we, personally, have
been using it on a daily basis. This is a perfect occasion for a
gift - to Ubu, to the Internet and to ourselves: two mirrors, one at
ubu.memoryoftheworld.org and one at ubu-mirror.ch.

For all accounts and purposes, something like Ubu should not exist.
A single person, Kenneth Goldsmith, using no money whatsoever, has
created the single-most important archive of avant-garde and outsider
art. Works that have played an important role in cultural history,
or could play in the future, have been collected, organized and made
available to anyone, with no restrictions, just the friendly reminder
to respect the works.

In a world of money-crazed start-ups and surveillance capitalism,
copyright madness and abuse, Ubu represents an island of culture. It
shows what a single person, with dedication and focus, can achieve.

There are lessons to be drawn from this:

[1] Keep it simple and avoid constant technology updates. Ubu is plain
HTML, written in a text-editor.

[2] Even a website should function offline. One should be able to take
the hard disk and run. Avoid the cloud - computers of people you don't
know and who don't care about you.

[3] Don't ask for permission. You would have to wait forever, turning
yourself into an accountant and a lawyer.

[4] Don't promise anything. Do it the way you like it.

[5] You don't need search engines. Rely on word-of-mouth and direct
linking to slowly build your public. You don't need complicated
protocols, digital currencies or other proxies. You need people who
care.

[6] Everything is temporary, even after 20 years. Servers crash, disks
die, life changes and shit happens. Care and redundancy is the only
path to longevity.


Care and redundancy is the reason why we decided to run mirrors. We
care and we want this resource to exist. The first four points are the
reason why we could do it fairly easily.

Ubu is now located in the US, Mexico, Iceland and Switzerland. The
Iceland mirror is part of a cultural activist community, the Swiss
mirror is run by a major art school. None of this matters, as long
as ubu.com runs fine. But should shit happen, this multiplicity of
locations and institutions might come in handy. We will see.

Find your Ubu. It's time to mirror each other in solidarity.

30 November 2016



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