A conversation between Kenneth Goldsmith and me, with Cheryl Donegan and Valerio Mannucci

Kenneth Goldsmith and Cheryl Donegan are here in Rome. In just a few days, they’ll be heading to Istria to spend the summer. Valerio Mannucci—Kenneth’s Italian translator, publisher, and a mutual friend—is here too. And then there’s me, waiting to meet them, sitting on the rooftop of Soho House, where we’re all staying. They arrive, both smiling. When I asked Valerio to connect me with Kenneth to talk about the dawn of the digital age, and of the internet in particular, it wasn’t to get answers. I was trying to understand if art had preserved and evolved a free, visionary use of the internet, that democratic ideal from tech’s early days.

There is a book by Kenneth, Uncreative Writing, which I consider the starting point for reflecting on authorship and the digital realm. It focuses on literature, but anyone interested in generative AI should consider it essential reading: it sparks lateral thinking, lateral thinking, lateral thinking. “Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing?” The internet is an elusive sphere. In speaking with Kenneth, I was looking for edges, for footholds to help me interpret the relationship between the internet, people, and digital repositories—which sometimes look like archives, and sometimes are archives.

What follows are excerpts from: Ubu.com, aka Ubu Web, Kenneth’s website, an archive-non-archive that promotes poetry, literature, and experimental art; the transcript of our conversation; the notes taken in my notebook; some books written by Kenneth. A kind of uncreative writing.

February 1, 2025. Kenneth Goldsmith on ubu.com wrote:

"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."

July 2, 2025. Rome, Italy.

GG (Giacomo Golinelli) Where is UbuWeb hosted now?

KG (Kenneth Goldsmith) Wait, where is it? It’s in Africa. It’s in Africa. Now the server is in Liberia.

VM (Valerio Mannucci) So you moved it there?

KG No, it was chased there. I mean, UbuWeb has been so many places that finally we connected with a private server run by Peter Sunde, co-founder of Pirate Bay [the BitTorrent search engine to free share content online, ed.]. Peter once said: “We treat intellectual property the way that rich people treat money. We bury it in offshore corporations.” He provides a cultural storage space for a lot of our favorite and the most important pirate archives, such as Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, Monoskop. I mean, all of us... These are all our friends. We call them shadow librarians. It’s beautiful.

GG Shadow librarians... beautiful.

KG Here’s the thing about copyright law—specifically digital copyright. If someone wants to sue you, they have to file in the country where the server is physically located. So to sue us, they have to go through the Liberian court system. Try that, man.

CD (Cheryl Donegan) Try to sue Ubu in Monrovia.

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 illegal; 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.

/ Ctrl+C Ctrl+V from Duchamp is My Layer

VM So you’re saying there’s no such thing as a truly objective archive in UbuWeb?

KG Exactly. As a matter of fact, UbuWeb is closer to a Wunderkammer than a proper archive. If we had done it “right,” by some official standard, it would be completely different. But we didn’t. Instead, it’s completely wrong, and that’s what makes it an artwork.

CD I always saw it as a kind of reconnaissance mission. You’re just taking, out of desperation, what you need. In our world, it was needing the avant-garde, which in the commercial New York art world was lost and not valued.

As computing progressed from command line to icon, concrete poetry’s parallel claim was that poetry, in order to remain relevant, needed to move from the verse and stanza to the condensed forms of the constellation, cluster, ideogram, and icon.

/ Ctrl+C Ctrl+V from Uncreative Writings

GG But can we even trust the internet to be an archive? Is it a permanent home for this material?

KG No. People assume the internet is forever, but it’s not. It gets censored, it gets taken down. Look at what recently happened in Iran—they shut down the internet completely. It’s contested, it’s fragile, it’s super fragile. The fact that it works at all is an amazing thing. The PDF you want today may not be there tomorrow. You can’t trust it. You need a backup for the internet. That’s why we’re working on something we call “UbuWeb in a cave.” A hacker and a friend of mine, Marcell Mars, says the future of the internet is off the internet. So, we’re making it possible to download the entire thing with one click onto a hard drive.

Named for Alfred Jarry’s mischievous, foul-mouthed, Dadaist protagonist Ubu Roi [1896], UbuWeb began as a site focusing on visual and concrete poetry. With the advent of the graphical web browser in the mid-1990s, I began scanning old concrete poems and posting them on the web. I was astonished by how fresh those dusty old paperbound pieces looked when backlit by the computer screen.

/ Ctrl+C Ctrl+V from Duchamp is My Layer

VM That brings up another point. UbuWeb hasn’t changed its design since 1996. Why the stubbornness to not modernize it?

KG Simple: It still works! It’s backwardly compatible. It works in Africa. It works in the smallest towns in Asia. It runs on the lowest bandwidth. You don’t need anything to access that knowledge. That’s the kind of democracy I’m interested in.

VM So the design is a direct product of its time?

KG Yes. If Ubu had been born 20 years later, it would look totally different. But in 1996, the internet was squeezed through a slow modem connection. Everything had to be tiny. That’s why there’s no code, no cookies, no sniffers, no ad trackers—because all of that just slows everything down.

VM And today’s internet feels like the opposite of that freedom.

KG Absolutely. The phone has actually prevented theft. Can you pirate an app? It’s really, really hard. They finally figured out how to keep everything within the device. The freedom we’re talking about is really Web 1.0.

CD The way I see it, they built the device with a mouth, but no way for things to come out. It only goes in. [What she actually said was “no assholes,” but I’m not sure she’d want it quoted like that].

KG It only goes in. Then it goes up into the stomach of the cloud, and they own it. This new environment just bypassed UbuWeb entirely. I used to fear they’d try to get rid of it, but instead, Instagram just ate my utopia. The entire art world exists only on Instagram now. I get the feeling they’ve sort of forgotten about UbuWeb.

GG So what was the original goal that today’s internet is missing?

KG UbuWeb was just a house to hold context. All the things on Ubu can probably be found elsewhere on the web, but they make no sense scattered about. My idea was to build the institution for them, to pull them all under one roof so they could dialogue with each other. It makes context. And that’s what’s missing today.

What we take to be graphics, sounds, and motion in our screen world is merely a thin skin under which resides miles and miles of language. […] Here’s a three lines of a .jpg:

^?Îj€≈ÔI∂fl ¥d4˙‡À,†ΩÑÎ óªjËqsõ ëY”Δ″ å)1Í.§ÏÄ@˙’∫JCGOnaå îÛµ}Tß’æ´’[“Ò*ä≠ˇ Í=äÖΩ;Í”≠Õ¢ø¥}è&£S¨Æπ’ëÉk©ı=/Á″/”˙ûöÈ>∞ad_ Í=äÖΩ;Í”≠Õ¢ø¥}è&£S¨Æπ’ëÉk©ı=/Á″/”˙ûöÈ>∞ad_ ïÉúö˙€Ì—éÆΔ’aø6ªÿ-

/ Ctrl+C Ctrl+V from Uncreative Writings