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UbuWeb serves the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness and so XP: the essential elements of this program are courage, audacity and revolt. Kenneth Goldsmith maintains Ubuweb as a "shadow library" that shares the world's knowledge in red instead of blue: catalogueing the people, projects and patterns important to the history of art, poetry, film, sound, dance, naming the unameable and seeing it named or maybe just a roomful of warm, like-minded bodies.
https://www.ubuweb.com/film/index.html Ubuhttp://c2.com C2 HEIGHT 450
The word "credit" comes from the latin word credo which means belief. Goldsmith's debt is to the master discourses that politicized the aesthetics of war ("the world's only hygiene") and also the supply chains still now and then called the Humanities: "The real thing," the website's copy attests, "is never easy to get to."
So what? Y not cancel Holden Caufield and slap a trigger warning on everything from Ulysses to Yul Brenner? Time and space died yesterday and the proof is not in the pudding but on Ken's personal server which he updates on Mondays. (No sleep for the weary: galleries and museums are traditionally closed on this day).
Fortunately ubuweb remains gleefully unaffiliated with any formal institution, commercial or otherwise, such that Goldsmith's relationship to futility is effectively futile. Ubuweb was never meant to be a foundation, a corporation or an established product category. Like Futurists, Concretists, Surrealists, Lettrists, Stuckists and just about everything else
> 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.
A federated wiki is a new type of distributed wiki maintained and operated in a decentralized way by its users, but with standards of conflictual collaboration similar to those established in git. The first wiki, C2 
, was intended as a community system to look for use value in software design patterns. What began as the first user-editable website launched on 25 March 1995 would fork and merge with the world wide web best known as Wikipedia, still the largest store of digital content in the world, and still an informal history.
Goldsmith's role for the past 28 years as the system administrator of the avant-garde has eclipsed his status as an American conceptual artist. As Goldsmith continues to teach, write and unpack his library onto the internet without permission, we are invited to
> Beggars can’t be choosers, and we gladly take whatever is offered to us. 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. ubu
>Category Home Page unrolls the full list of more than 3600 members and visitors that contributed to the Wiki Wiki Web since 1995 - an immense amount of creativity and expertise... c2
> rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order. Instead, we receive glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill.
Like the Wiki Wiki Web, UbuWeb began as a self-hosted repository of free content intended to push the boundaries of web computing against the ever-precarious infrastructures that sustain institutional memory:
> Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We've won every prestigious Internet award there is and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools; we've gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders researching a paper on concrete poetry.
What UbuWeb and Wiki have in common are "marginal situations", created by domain experts working in the two most esoteric fields on earth: computer programming and conceptual poetry. Yet both have committed a significant portion of their careers to ensure access to and distribution of the kinds of content that make open creative community possible. Each
> embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4 dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.
Ward and Ken operate in the distinct domains of poetry and programming, respectively, to ensure access to and distribution of the kinds of content that make open creative community possible. Ubuweb's distinctively red hyperlinks hark to a familiar platflorm that can be edited by any person such that blue words are nearly universally associated with it.
Federated Wiki, the culmination of the SFW project reached in 2015, asks peers to launch their own sites on a self-hosted system of personal servers in order to share and distribute content. A server component, managing page storage and collaboration between peer servers, and a client component presenting and modifying the server state in server specific ways, comprise the software as a mode of authorship.
Federated Wiki has evolved relative to changes in the understanding of content and context online, as intellectual property on the web undergoes transformations within and against the conditions of its re-use. Against which, gnubuweb feels not only appropriate, but the only thing that could possibly be appropriate, at least when it comes to maintaining webservices as "vociferously anti-institutional" and "eminently fluid" between users that "refuse to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by" towards ways of working by doing that are flexible, robust, and capable of serving and surprising even domain experts.
If Federated Wiki project will be judged successful to the degree that it can demonstrate how wiki would have been better had it been effectively federated from the beginning, gnubuweb aims to effectively federate ubuweb with similar goals in mind.
We intend for this particular implementation of Federated Wiki to remain faithful to the principled approach to free software insisted upon by Ward and Ken, as actively demonstrated in the original Wiki Wiki Web and UbuWeb, with the goal of extending these inherent purposes to future iterations of the web.