Cebreros-Early Archiving in Internet

Cebreros Urzaiz, Maria del Carmen

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UBUWEB / Early Archiving in the Internet

UBUWEB. The project, the sources, the infrastructure.

UBUWEB [ubu.com] appeared on-line in 1996 as an independent project for making available a

selection of avant-garde diverse materials through the internet. Kenneth Goldsmiths poet, editor

of art history books, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania is his founder. The

website started as a selection of Goldsmiths scanned concrete poems, then expanded to his

personal collection of sound poetry, later a selection of key time-based or multidisciplinary

experimental works from the twentieth century, some of them key works, some others quite

obscure and unknownyet all of them restricted in general to their availability via free

download. Additional curatorial commentaries and essays have been progressively aggregated to

the poetry, film, sound and dance sections. Further sub-sections curated by other cultural

producers came afterwards like Ubu Editions & Publishing the Unpublishable, Ethnopoetics or

Electronic Music. As Goldsmiths has stated as with all the content that is housed on UbuWeb,

we find distinctions increasingly more difficult to make, and that's just the way we like it 1

As archivist and information specialist Margaret Smith has commented, UBUWEB is an

anomaly. It is not a digital collection archived using a fixed data-based system that would allow

a consistent classification, the recording of metadata, and differentiated searching engines that

would make it more functional. 2 UBUWEB is a collective assemblage of personally digitized

materials. The layout is a series of lists first a menu with the main sections in alphabetical order,

within each section figure another list with the names of the artists, philosophers and producers

in alphabetical order, and then the list of items from that author, the date of realization and

occasionally some minor technical details. Most of these materials are orphan, out-of-print or

1 Text of presentation of the Outsiders section [http://www.ubu.com/outsiders] (Accessed February 10, 2013) 2 Archiving Ubu blog created by Margaret Smith, May, 2010 as part of the exit requirement of the Master's of Science in Library and Information Science degree at Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY USA). http://archivingubu.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: February 10, 2013)


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have been submitted by their creators; this condition has prevented their collaborators from

incurring in legal conflicts. In exceptional occasions when somebody declares to have the

royalties of any item and argues to be against it being freely distributed via internet, the item

gets immediately removed.

Technically UBUWEB operates on a gift-economy basis, as his founder has named it; broadband

and hosting is donated by a series of artistic and academic partner-institutions. 3 The site is fully

available for free, all the submitted items have been gathered and digitized by individual efforts,

there is no-profit in the project, no material is bought nor sold. The website collaborators also

reject publicity or grants as funding sources. 4

Old fashioned accessibi l ity. Technical aspects.

As revealed a few years ago, video streaming represents 25-40% of all the internet traffic, and

YouTube and Netflix are the most important websites distributing this type of contents.5 When

thinking about accessibility to the moving image streamed from internet to personal computers

or devices a number of elements have to be considered: compression/quality of the image,

length of the clip, required bandwidth, processing and temporary storage capacity of the

personal equipment. Another aspect to ponder is if the website charges for the service or if it is

sponsored by publicity that many times is embedded in the media clips.

3 Anthology Film Archives (founded by Jonas Mekas); Bidoun Magazine (Art and Culture from the Middle East); CENTRO diseo, cine, television (Mexico); Electra (London based contemporary art organization); Electronic Poetry Center (University at Buffalo, State University of New York); PennSound (University of Pennsylvania); Primary Information (non-profit organization publishing and distributing out-of-print artists books); WFMU (New York Radio Station). 4 Interview with Kenneth Goldsmiths, So[n]ia, Radio Web MACBA, December 16, 2010 in http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia?id_capsula=788 (Accessed: February 10, 2013). 5 Network Characteristics of Video Streaming Traffic lecture presented by Arshwin Rao, et al. at the 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), December 69, 2011, University of Tokyo, Japan in http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2011/papers/1569470149.pdf (Accessed: February 10, 2012).


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UBUWEB is a website hand-coded in HTML; the content like the editorial notes and comments

are typed within the script, some works have been scanned as JPG files, and larger essays are

compiled as PDF files. In regards to time-based clips: audio files format is MP3 (Audio Layer III), a

highly standardized one that could be played directly from the browser; the format of early

uploaded video files is AVI (Audio Video Interleaved, an early multimedia format introduced in

1992 by Microsoft) and more recently uploaded are MP4 (Moving Picture Coding Experts Group),

which makes them easier to download in the computers hard drive than streaming from the

website; these files are played with software like JWPlayer. Someone very enthusiastic could

download the complete website and have his/her own backup copy for as long as his/her hard-

drive functions or is periodically migrated, although the tree structure of the site is not

completely decipherable.

AVI is now an outdated format normally less compressed when compared to more recent

formats like WMV (Windows Media Video, the compression format used for example for Netflix

broadcasting) or FLV (Flash Video, current default format employed by YouTube), therefore

playback is slower. Most UBUWEB video clips resolution is poor (around 384 x 288 px, varying

according to the format) and a five minute clip could be almost 30 Mb in size; although the

characteristics vary, there are no standards in the digitization of the files given the collaborative

nature of the project and its diversity of sources. Leo Enticknap compares the definition or

resolution between 35mm film (if it were hypothetically digitized without any compression and

faithfully representing all the densities of the emulsion) and MPEG2 compressed PAL television, 6

I will add to this comparison a sample video from UBUWEB; the resulting relation between

stored information and compression is this:

Source Resolution Stored information per frame

Film 35 mm 5000 px2 40 Gb per frame MPEG-2 PAL television 720 x 576 px 25 Mb per frame AVI videoclip UBUWEB7 384 x 288 px 2.64 kb per frame

6 Enticknap, Leo. Moving Image Technology From Zoetrope to Digital. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. p. 222. 7 The selected sample video clip is Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp, length: 05:09, 29 frames per second, file size 26.1Mb. Source: http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/ video/Duchamp-Marcel_Anemic-Cinema_1926.avi (Accessed: February 10, 2012).


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However, these formats represent some advantages too given their high compatibility with most

equipment if we think about personal computers; in the case of smartphones and other type of

personal portable devices, the audio files can be played from the website but video does not.

Clearly many sound, film and video files have traversed a number of stages from original

recording to digitization and compression for the internet; for example some sound files have

been extracted from documentaries, and some films seem to have been home-recorded after a

TV program in a VHS and then digitized. Many clips are highly pixeled, others show lack of

synchrony, some others flicker. As media reviewer Sean Dockraw has stated (l)ittle of UbuWebs

content was created on the computer and even less was intended to be seen there.8

The future after UBUWEB. Conclusions.

UBUWEB has being on-line for seventeen years now. Before any discussion we have to think

about the technology available when the project startedspecially the DIY technology at hand

for individual internet beginners. It is commendable keeping the website alive and investing the

energy in expanding it. Adaptation to cutting-edge technologies, in this case, would mean to

precipitate the end of the project. If UBUWEB should transform and evolve towards a

systematized bank with more explicit and expanded curatorial guidelines is out of question. The

very features that make the project so vulnerable are the same that have granted the relevance

and reputation it has now: keeping independent and accessible for an ample cultural

community.

The nature of the experimental and conceptual work that UBUWEB provides access to was, in its

time, not concerned about royalties and authorial recognition, as we drastically experience it

now. Also works by contemporary artists highly successful in the market are hosted in the

websitelike Bruce Nauman, Francis Als or Tacita Dean to name a few; the extended 8 Dockray, Sean Multimedia. Ubuweb Review in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 71, No. 3, Special Issue on Architectural Representations 1, September 2012, pp. 429.


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recognition of this initiative in the cultural community implies an added value for the works it

shelters. It is interesting to see a flickering line announcing We are not accepting submissions at

this time in the contact section of ubu.com. 9 It illustrates how more people desire to be part

of the community and getting their work affiliated to the spirit and ideas presented by UBUWEB.

It is now, however, a Wiki; that would be a different project and probably a good one.

Although UBUWEB resisted to become incorporated to any institution, it has become a fabulous,

referential and almost necessary tool for artists, art students, teachers and art enthusiasts. On

the other hand it keeps as a source for the initiated. UBUWEB is not an on-line substitute for

Sundays video-rental. It is half a research tool and half an artistic curiosity. Its rudimentary

design and technology along with its labyrinthine structure makes it some kind of digital

Pandoras Box in which users do not know what they will find, that is exactly what stimulates

them to navigate the site and return to it every now and then. Its founder Kenneth Goldsmiths

has declared that UBUWEB does not provide a primary experience and it is more like a

postcard evoking that those works existed and should be searched. 10 However many video clips

that could be watched in UBUWEB might never be presented in a museum or gallery show.

Therefore the idea of primary experience is out of the point: the user in front of his/her laptop

or a group of students discussing a clip projected in a classroomin spite of the flickering,

pixelated, iridescent imageis the actual valuable experience. As Hito Steyerl has exposed in

regards to what she calls the poor image, a digital image that has progressively degraded and

exponentially circulated through the internet:

By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the original, but on the transience of the copy. 11

UBUWEB is a model because it seized the advantages of internets early possibilities. To pursue a

similar project now would mean using more advanced technology, but within a more disciplined

9 http://ubu.com/contact/ (Accessed February 10, 2013) 10 Interview with Kenneth Goldsmiths, So[n]ia, Radio Web MACBA, December 16, 2010 in http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia?id_capsula=788 (Accessed: February 10, 2013). 11 Steyerl, Hito, In Defense of the Poor Image in E-Flux Journal, Number 10, November 2009 in http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (Accessed: February 10, 2013)


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and surveyed World Wide Web. If something excels of UBUWEB is the role of collective access to

knowledge and information made collaboratively available for others. UBUWEBs case stimulates

a reflection regarding the amount of effort invested in the preservation of the moving image for

the future: in recording human creations, inventions, ventures and imagination. The future for

those accumulated images and information could follow two paths: making it profitable or

making it meaningful. For those efforts to be meaningful, access and audience should be

guaranteed and promoted, otherwise knowledge and experience are at stake.

Bibl iography and References Archiving Ubu in http://archivingubu.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: February 10, 2013) Dockray, Sean Multimedia. Ubuweb Review in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 71, No. 3, Special Issue on Architectural Representations 1, September 2012. p. 429-430. Enticknap, Leo. Moving Image Technology From Zoetrope to Digital. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. Interview with Kenneth Goldsmiths, So[n]ia, Radio Web MACBA, December 16, 2010 in http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia?id_capsula=788 (Accessed: February 10, 2013) Rao, Arshwin, et al. Network Characteristics of Video Streaming Traffic (lecture), 7th International Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), December 69, 2011, University of Tokyo, Japan in http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2011/papers/1569470149.pdf (Accessed: February 10, 2012). Reducing Video File Size in http://www.deskshare.com/resources/articles/ dmcpro_ReduceFileSize.aspx (Accessed: February 10, 2013) Steyerl, Hito, In Defense of the Poor Image in E-Flux Journal, Number 10, November 2009 in http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (Accessed: February 10, 2013) U B U W E B in http://www.ubu.com (Accessed: February 10, 2013)

Cebreros-Early Archiving in Internet

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