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Conversation_with_Kenneth_Goldsmith
4 July 2024, 10:00 AM
Introductions
**Marta (00:14:27) **
If you could give us a brief introduction and maybe already go into directly the first part of our discussion, our interests, which is the why, the politics of publishing. If you could tell us why you operate the way you operate, if you have mission ideals, goals, or even references that guide your own practice.
Kenneth (00:15:14)
Okay. So, I’m Kenneth. I started (UbuWeb) [https://ubu.com/] in 1996 and things have changed a lot since then. Sometimes I find myself speaking like it’s 1998. I’m not comfortable with the developments that have happened in digital publishing or let’s just call it the digital world. I kind of feel like Instagram ate my utopia. I’ve kind of dropped out of radical publishing because I’ve become extraordinarily disillusioned with the turn that the web has taken since the advent of social media, truly the advent of Donald Trump, who ate social media as well.
Then everything got spoiled. So I’m not so sure that I’m the best person to talk to about what’s happening now or the future because I’ve actually withdrawn from circulating works publicly. I’ve tried to maintain a practice of private publishing now, of unique publishing, of making one-of-a-kind things that, although informed entirely by the digital, are mostly analog in their production because they cannot be usurped, hijacked, or detorned in the worst ways possible that really just ended up happening to everything on the web that I loved. So I’m trying to just make a protected space for myself because I’ve been doing this for so long. We’re coming up on 30 years of UbuWeb, which still functions, but I’ve lost my passion for the digital pioneering that I was so invested in. I feel sad. I feel lost.
Why: Politics of Publishing
Marta (00:17:42)
Well, yeah, that’s a very interesting position to take, and I think the space of retreat is actually important to understand for our own research because this kind of meeting, as Ilan said before, in our consortium starts from a place of a panic attack or like an understanding that there’s something going wrong. Also understanding the symptoms and how we got to this point I think is very valuable to our work. What would say went wrong, or at what point did you feel like this might be a moment to retreat? What was the breaking point for you?
Kenneth (00:18:51)
[[social media | It was gradual, there were so many breaking points, but I really would pin it to Trump’s rise on social media, specifically, which at first was intriguing to see the way he misused the media. At that time, I was on Twitter, and the way he misused Twitter really was modernist inflected. Completely unconscious, Joyce-ian even. I mean, this guy’s never read Joyce, but he was doing something that was sort of brilliant. It was everything I’d always hoped that social media could be, even in its perversity. Then I just realized it was the complete opposite of my utopia, obviously politically. Then it got really confused and surveilled: the space of social media became a space of surveillance, not only by the tech companies, but more disturbingly by my neighbors and my fellow citizens. You can’t make a move on social media without being surveilled. So it’s real Stasi era shit. I was like, wow, I mean, I also really do think that (Zuboff’s book) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism] really opened my eyes to my naivety. I just realized at a certain point that I got everything wrong. So much of my theorizing was just completely wrong. I missed so much. I was so enthusiastic and, in the 90s, the web was just such a beautiful utopia. It was the world as I really wanted it to be, and it came crashing down. It was crash right around probably 2013, 2014, you know, during Trump’s rise.
Marta (00:21:06)
I mean, I think some people have defined for better or for worse Donald Trump as the greatest poster of our generation in a sense. Maybe not knowingly he fully understood how to game the system of social media.
Kenneth (00:21:33)
He was really good at it. I mean, I don’t know if he still is because I would never even look at truth social. In those early days, I mean, it was really frightening to recognize some of my ideas in the worst monster possible. Then it made me feel like Marinetti or Mussolini. I was like, wait a minute. I got to back off of this. So that was the beginning, the beginning of the end for me.
Marta (00:22:12)
How did you see that affecting a bit more the legacy media publishing? I mean, not only the election of Donald Trump, but in general, the environment and the focus on content that social media brought?
Kenneth (00:22:32)
Well, social media just ate everything. I don’t think anybody goes to UbuWeb anymore. They don’t leave Instagram. Everybody’s corralled on an app. Apps are just corralling devices that keep you within the confines of where they want you. My sense is that most people really don’t use the Web anymore. They feel that they have everything they need on social media. Streaming companies, media companies, social media companies have entrapped people. So the notion of the open Web, it still exists. Nobody’s stopping me. And all these notions of an undemocratic Web never actually really came to fruition because actually everybody just stopped using the Web. And they managed to just control and capitalize and tame the Web the way that they always wanted to.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
Marta (00:23:44) - Yeah, I mean, there’s an incredible lack of knowledge of what the internet is in my generation, and all we know is platforms. That’s quite different from a lot of the early uses of it. We’ve grown quite blind to the possibilities beyond the platformized web.
Kenneth (00:24:10)
Yeah, there’s this term that came up and I really hate it. It’s called Creator, because creators create for a platform, specifically catering to that, to monetize or to capitalize. It’s concordant with whatever oppressive system happens to be in place that they are playing to. They’re playing to a system completely uncritically, because they call themselves a creator. Whereas I had to really think about the difference between a creator and an artist. You could say that many artists are creators for the art world. Many poets are creators for the poetry industry, but that was never interesting to me. The interesting idea of an artist was somebody who went against whatever prevailing system there was as an act of resistance, as an act of real uncreativity or slash creativity. My critique on creativity was always that creativity was concordant in the way the creator is concordant. If I was to go back to uncreativity today, I would have something really equally stupid to say about creators as I did about creativity to write “creator”, “creativity”. These are terms I can’t stand. How do we get out of this sort of “create”, “creative”, “creator” space? It’s useless because it’s monetized. Most artistic production isn’t monetized. So, it’s stupid and it’s usurped. It’s taken all of the energy out of radical forms of publishing, practice, and thinking. So it’s just not interesting to me. I get it, but it’s actually sucked all the air out of the room.
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Ilan (00:26:45)
What I hear is that utopias are not made only by nice ideas. Utopias are made also by huge drives of negativity and critique, and I’m thinking if it’s not the moment to make negativity nice again, make negativity a force with energizing potential, we live in a country where people around us are toxically positive. When you are critiquing something or you’re being negative, say something constructive, or something productive. They’re always there to try to redeem or take your negativity and try to construct something out of it that then they can use for monterization. We should find a way to make negativity a powerful driving force in order to think of new formats, new media, new audiences, new content. I’m wondering if there is a space for that. I know you are right now in the Adriatic coast, this doesn’t look like your Manhattan loft, obviously. You’re in a place where you can develop some negativity. My experience in ex-Yugoslavia is that there is a space to express this, whereas in the United States, you might be extremely marginalized or isolated to feel such discomfort with social media or with creativity.
Kenneth (00:28:39)
Yeah, I just wanted to say, there is plenty of critique and “productive negativity”. Look at the Gaza protests, that was really energizing, also the George Floyd protests that we had. There is critique, there is negativity, and there is pushback in America. Just to make a short tangent, my sense of the Gaza protests, let’s say the student protests recently in the U.S., is that we’re really, it’s a displaced anxiety on the second coming of Trump. We’re going to need active, angry, negative, critiquing people for the coming regime of Donald Trump, number two, and there’s so much anxiety in America about that, that cannot, as you’re saying, Ilan, that cannot be articulated, because of the culture of positivity. There’s this giant repressive force, and I think social media also has a role in this, that’s pushing down any type of domestic critique in America. So then it’s getting displaced onto an international stage, the citizens of Gaza. In a way, though, I actually think it’s really about the citizens of America, but you’re just not allowed to be negative in that way, I suppose. So there’s plenty of negativity in America, and plenty of unproductive negativity in America, you know, from the right, also, we have plenty of that shit in America. But that’s another space, right? And I don’t think it’s really what you’re referring to. I think you’re referring to a cultural space of artistic production and the distribution of production of cultural artifacts. There’s just a lot of contradictory forces at work in America right now. I’m encouraged by some of them, and I’m discouraged by much of them as well.
So, as for Yugoslavia, I can’t really read the culture well, because of my language, obviously, I don’t speak any Croatian, and my Italian is shitty, where I’m in an Italian speaking part here. My Italian is shitty enough that I actually lose nuance, I’m okay, practically speaking. But for me, just this year has been an escape, I think, from so much turmoil. The stuff that I was talking about goes back to the rise of Trump. My university was the center of the beginning of much of the Gaza conflict in America that was playing out on campus in very confusing and very chaotic ways. I left in December, and I won’t go back until next January.
So, this sort of retreat to a place, I’m also offline. This is the only thing I’m doing all year, because I love you, all of you. I love Nero and I love you, Ilan. We’re just friends here. I’ve just taken a break. I signed off my email. I haven’t looked at my email since December. I will not look again until January, though. I’m loving this so much. I’m feeling like maybe I should just kill my email. I have to have my university email for my job when I get back. But the stuff where all things come in, that’s kind of dead. So, now I’m somewhere where I’m mute on the language. I’m in the countryside. There’s nothing happening here culturally. There’s never anything happening here. It’s just an agricultural environment of winemaking and olive oil producing. I’m working on things on paper. I figured this is really the best way just to break from the year I’ve had, and it’s been really nice.
I have to also just say, and I don’t know how informed you all are of this, but UbuWeb is sort of done. After nearly 30 years, it’s not growing anymore. I can talk about the reasons for that, if that’s interesting to this group. 30 years of coding and moving information and reposting and sharing and really being in the center of some kind of exchange digitally, I’m not doing that anymore. That’s also a huge change for me. I would code UbuWeb five, six hours a night for 30 years, and I’m not doing that anymore. So yeah, here I am. I have six more blissful months. I love this and I feel like the hippies in the 60s that left the city and went to live in communes, and grow their own food. I mean, I get that now. I never thought I’m the most urban person in the world, but I understand why they did that now. I love this. I kind of feel like the hippies in the 60s that left the city and went to live in communes, and grow their own food. I mean, I get that now. I never thought I’m the most urban person in the world. But I understand why they did that now.
**Ilan (00:35:10) **
I remember John Cage said something like, somebody had asked him, so what’s gonna happen to your reputation after you die? And Cage, who was really publishing very traditionally, said, well, there’s so much of me around that it’ll really be hard to get rid of me. You think about the lifespan of physical books. I mean, they don’t get thrown out. I mean, maybe they get burned once in a while, but they get circulated. They have these like really, really long pun intended shelf life. So if I stopped, if I withdrew now, there’s so fucking much of me out there that I really don’t have to worry about legacy in that way. Even in a small press, (Hillary Clinton emails book) [https://www.neroeditions.com/product/hillary/] that I did with Nero. We didn’t do too many of them, but I guarantee you, all of them that we did probably are still in existence somewhere. They’re beautiful, they’re substantial, they’re interesting, and they might have some kind of resale value in the world anyway. So that’s never gonna disappear.
So if I just continue to keep publishing, then it’s just ego-driven, right? I’m hoping for my bestseller now. I’m hoping I’m going to win the Man Booker Prize, this kind of shit. I mean, that would be the only reason. I do think it’s very pathetic. I see friends of mine that are older than me, let’s say, language poets who are 10-15 years older than me, and they’re frantically publishing, and nobody’s going to read them, and they’re never going to win those prizes. I just see that as real acts of desperation. They’re good, they did important work. They’re still making good work. It might not be as relevant. And you do have to think about relevancy as well. So, I struggle with that. You know, as an artist, I have a healthy ego, right? Like all artists do. But, you know, it’s sort of diminishing returns for me at this point.
Discussion
Ilan (00:42:02)
But at the same time, Kenny, one of the things we learn from you is that we don’t care if we are read - we don’t care if people are reading us. I mean, readership is just a statistical mass of people that needs to be quantified. Every author is frustrated about the amount of books being sold. The artists are frustrated, asking how many people came to their opening, how many reviews did they get, how many sales, et cetera? And we learn from you is that thinkership is what matters, not readership. So, people that you can think with, right? So, a book is just a signal to a community of thinkers.
Kenneth (00:42:36)
Yeah, yeah, it’s true, and, you know, I’ve never seen the giant, giant, big, world’s biggest book that you published with (JBE) [https://www.jbe-books.com/products/onepiece-by-ilan-manouach]. I have never seen it, but I’m so impacted by the thinkership of that work, but your actual books that I have are the most valuable things I own. They’re great to think about, when I show them to people, they freak out. I mean, you started publishing with Jean Bois at that time. I showed David your books and I could tell him about it, but wow, when he saw them, he was like, okay, this is incredible. You know, it’s both ways, right? So, your books are propulsive in thinking, but they’re also extraordinary in their physical presence. So that was the kind of thing that we were thinking around 2010 was that we could stop publishing physical objects, but that never really happened.
[[digital objects | I noticed also around 2010, when everybody was talking about digital publishing, that actual publishing got so much more beautiful. Magazines, which were just shitty ones, became books, and they also got really expensive because nobody was buying them. Right, these are all regular magazines. They still make them. If you go into a magazine store in New York now, particularly fashion magazines, they’re not like Vogue or Elle or some shit like that. Then now they’re like [FUORI!!!] (https://www.neroeditions.com/product/fuori/). What you guys did with the Francesco Urbano Ragazzi’s- every fucking fashion magazine looks like FUORI!!! now, which I have sitting on my table, as, again like it’s just sitting here because Francesco Urbano Ragazzi brought me a copy and it’s just the most beautiful object. It’s the most beautiful thing. Oh, you can say, I republished every issue of the 70s gay magazine from Italy. I was just with those guys in Venice and they showed me the fashion things that I can’t remember the name of the fashion company, did you know, which is just those incredible sleek, (sequined cover of FUORI!!!) [https://www.gucci.com/ch/it/st/stories/article/gucci-twinsburg-fashion-show-details]. I was like, oh fuck, this is great. So there’s this sort of funny play I think that Ilan is getting at between the thinkership and the physical object. I would not want to live, Ilan, without your physical objects, even though they are extraordinarily propulsive.
]]
Discussion
Ilan (00:45:33)
Sorry, I don’t want to monopolize the discussion, but I am. I want to come back to the thing that you said about Trump. You know, that the way Trump used Twitter has been developed or nurtured to be artistic avant-garde. So he took the means of art and he made politics out of it. Similarly, I’m expecting Biden to do that. The debate between Biden and Trump was so pathetic, Biden felt like some sort of poet, in a Dadaist way. I’m sure there’s a lot of poets doing this kind of work and I’m wondering, we are some sort of sandbox, making tools for politicians to use later and to dominate the planet. If we understand the role of artists as a laboratory for global governance, then there’s a renewed interest and creativity again, in all the sports. I mean that’s beautiful and I think the hope is that the work we’re doing is channeled and seeps through in different ways.
Kenneth (00:47:03)
It’s some useful, extraordinarily perverse and I believe that. I didn’t think about the Biden thing and I, fortunately, I’m here, I didn’t see any of it, which I’m so thankful for, and I’m actually going to be here on Election Day in the US, which I’m really thankful for. We can reframe them, but it gets sticky, because it gets back to Marinetti and Mussolini, and the Francesco- they were at Bono Ragazzi’s the other day- were telling me that there’s some right-wing figure, a cultural figure that keeps citing futurism. I can’t remember the name, maybe you guys know the name of that person that he’s thinking about. They’re talking all about futurism all the time. Then there’s also the real problem, like CasaPound in Italy, which is, like, fuck. As a Jew, I’ve always had some problems with Pound, but he was just fucking crazy, like so many artists are, just a crazy guy, brilliant artist, crazy man. I forgive him. Allen Ginsberg, the biggest Jew of all time, went to visit Pound, I think in Rapallo, and got Pound to admit that his antisemitism was “suburban” right, I mean, the guy was out of his mind, clearly. So if Ginsberg could forgive Pound, I can forgive Pound, but then when I see shit like CasaPound, it really blows my mind. So this is where the opposite side is of what you’re talking about, Ilan, where it’s propulsive and perverse and sort of funny. Do you think the CasaPound followers actually read the cantos? That can’t be. Can you Italian people tell me if those young fascists of Italy are actually reading the cantos?
So, what the fuck? So the Pound is just some great fascist proponent, anti-Semite to them? Dinunzio keeps coming up, So there’s this thing between Pound, Dinunzio, and Marinetti, and the fun part begins to fall off a little bit and gets me scared, I think.
Who: Community of Publishing
Marta (00:50:12)
Something that I would be interested in hearing from you and also from your space of retreat, do you, first of all, see yourself still part of a community of writers, thinkers? And do you see, if so, the people around you, your peers, engaging in similar practices of retreat, of refusal? How do you feel in your environment?
Kenneth (00:50:57)
With the rise of populism, it really does feel like the 1930s again, and so many of the people that were proponents of radical ideas of publishing, literature, and web have been banished and de-platformed. The avant-garde, sometime around the twenties, became villainized. Again, it’s just a repeat of what happened in America in the 1930s, in a time where fascism rose and economies collapsed, that art had to have an element of utility to it. So you’ve got social realism in America, and anybody that was affiliated in the 1920s with what was called ultramodernism, I’m thinking particularly of a group of composers, found themselves banished, de-platformed out of work, right? It’s the same thing now. So I find my community marginalized, de-platformed, it doesn’t have a voice. That’s really, really been hard and discouraging, but I think it got swept out in a tidal wave of populism. So yeah, it feels extraordinary. What felt really cohesive back in around 2010 really feels completely shattered now. All the people are doing great work. We continue to do our work, but it has very little receptivity.
Marta (00:53:05)
What about the community of readers then? Do you see that, with the rise of populism or social media, or whatever, how has that affected readership and the extent to which you can connect to it maybe in a more direct way?
Kenneth (00:53:26)
**Marta (00:56:05) **
Yeah, there’s this interesting tension between a lot of the movement connected to George Floyd, Black Lives Matter. There was the idea that silence is violence. If you would not speak up, then you would be considered to engage in a sort of violence, but then, of course, too much noise, and then you would be blocking out the important information. Either way, you were still participating in this media frenzy. So, I mean, there’s also the metaphor of the dark forest coming from the Liu Cixin trilogy that is sort of saying, that maybe the retreat, the silence is a tactic for survival. I think this is also something that Geert Lovink also talks about in some of (his work) [https://networkcultures.org/geert/2022/05/05/just-out-stuck-on-the-platform-reclaiming-the-internet-by-geert-lovink/] of these practices of hiding and how maybe that’s where the new radical forms of activism can lay, but of course, you can start to think if everyone is silent, then what do you do?
Kenneth (00:57:20)
I mean, the notion of silence is violence, it was only one type of discourse that was allowed to be spoken anyway, as you’re saying, a discourse of noise was not permitted. A discourse of nonsense was not permitted. A discourse of perversity was not permitted. This was a totally contradictory notion. There is only one type of voice that’s allowed to be expressed. I find that kind of repression to be fascistic in its own way. So, it’s become complicated. Anyway, it’s an English word that’s called woodshedding. Sometimes, guitarists in particular, would just drop out for a really long time to work on new techniques and to just go into the woodshed and disappear for a while and come out with some other thing. So I think that this notion of disappearance can be really productive and also really radical, but also, there’s just so much fucking noise. I mean, everybody now has to be so public all the time. What is that? Why do we have to be so public?
I’m questioning that. I didn’t question it for a long time. I really loved being public. I’m a New Yorker. We’re kind of public people, and we’re loud. It was like what Ilan was talking about, in terms of politeness and non-negativity, like there’s a certain moment in America where people became extraordinarily polite and non-confrontational because they were afraid of getting shot because of the gun violence in that country. Then also, retreat has the sense of right-wing lunatics that retreat to Idaho and create white supremacist states of protectionism. It’s the other side, again, of that hippie commune. So all of these things are so loaded and so problematic. I say, I want to retreat. It’s kind of like, sometimes I used to grow a very big beard, and then I realized that was co-opted maybe by right-wing also. Like January 6, all these guys had like giant fucking crazy beards, and what do you fucking do? How do you move? How do you survive? What move is the right move to do? Ethically, morally, and also for your own sanity. It’s so hard. I’m so glad I’m not 30 years old right now, because I can imagine how hard that path is for people. It’s insane.
Discussion
Ilan (01:01:00)
So Kenny, you’re like the person with which we should talk about writing. I would maybe turn the thing and talk about reading. Maybe it’s the moment in which instead of publishing, and writing, even in a creative way, is the moment in which we should rethink about reading. Maybe we are not able to read anymore. So I’m curious to know your point of view about reading, how reading changed in the last decades, and how this new way of reading is also our way of sharing, publishing, producing contents?
Kenneth (01:01:45)
I mean, around uncreative writing, I talked a lot about, or no, maybe it was around the book called Wasting Time on the Internet. That’s right. It was a book that was a reaction to everybody saying how horrible the internet was. I was like, no, and again, I got this so wrong. I framed it as something being really good, but there were still some good things there. One of the things that I said was that we’re actually reading and writing much more than we ever have. I think that’s still true. People spending all day on their phones, they’re looking at images on Instagram, but they’re also reading comments, and they’re also writing comments, and that sort of short form is a form of reading, and it is a form of writing. I’m not sure it’s any better or any worse than long forms of writing. I think in that book, I traced this trajectory of the compression of language that begins with the telegraph and goes through the newspaper headline and the Times Square zip, and this sort of forms of compression down to 256 characters, or maybe it was 140 characters originally, was 140 characters on Twitter, which was the ultimate sort of form of compression, which turned language into sort of a desktop icon, something quick and readable. This is also where I brought back into the idea the notion of visual poetry as compressed icons that could be read instantly so that you didn’t need a sonata or something like that, a stanza, let’s say. You just needed a visual word that was done well, which is something advertising has already done, where it all dovetailed with pop and iconicity. I still believe all those things to be true. I do think that people are reading and writing, and then that’s my sense. It’s OK. I think it’s going to survive. You never see an image unaccompanied by, without text around it. Maybe if you’re watching a movie without subtitles you’ll sort of get some pure image. But even if you go to a museum, there’s always a wall label next to it. There’s always text. In the
newspaper or on the newspaper, there’s a caption. There’s a photograph. There’s a caption. And so I kind of feel like language as a vehicle itself is pretty safe.
I remember in the 80s, and I’ve maybe talked about this in Uncreative Writing, there was a show that was held at the Whitney that was called Image World. It was at the time of television, which just looked like it was going to eat static images. It was going to eat print culture completely and be moving. You had an artistic movement in New York that was called the Pictures Generation. It really addressed that moment in which we became an image world rather than a textual world, but what that didn’t take into account was just around the corner was computing, which is all linguistically based. For example, again, we’ve all received a JPEG in the email that didn’t render as an image but just rendered as miles and miles of code, and that code is just all alphanumeric language. So really, all of our digital world is comprised entirely of language. So we’re good for language. I think we’re OK on language.
Now, the second part of that is maybe my retreat. I’ve just been spending this year reading like mad because I’m offline. I always read a lot, but this year, I’ve actually had the time and the space to dig and to read extraordinarily deeply. I read on a Kobo because I can’t, in Croatia, I’m not going to get too many English books. I like the Kobo. I love the Kobo, and (Marcell Mars) [https://monoskop.org/Marcell_Mars], so I don’t know if you’re talking to Marcell, but he runs (Memory of the World) [https://memoryoftheworld.org/] and LibGen and everything’s available. So that’s fun. I’m doing a lot of reading this year.
Ilan (01:06:29)
I remember when you were in Athens, you spoke about this kind of snowfall of text. You said that most of the text is made for machines or for systems to be read by systems. I consider you still like one of the first quantitative writers, one of the writers that said early on that all text is about quantity. The new capacity of artists and writers is to have to find the tools to navigate this kind of overload of information or abundance of information and find the tools to do this. I’m wondering now, Kenny, what is your take on this? Because now we have the tools to do that. Now we can parse 30 petabytes of comics and understand what humanity thinks about speed throughout the 20th century and on and in different localities and geographies. Now we have the tools to do this. Do you imagine new artistic practices coming out of it? Would you like to be involved in these kind of things? Or are you like, OK, I got the principle of it, and I’m not so curious about the forms this will produce or something.
Kenneth (01:08:01)
Well, I see so little good stuff. I mean, your AI comic book is genius, totally genius. I love that book so much.
I think my experiences with AI have been really bad. To me, AI has ended up reifying whatever it is we know. I learned this a long time ago when I had a meeting with some pioneering AI people, and they were trying to make a machine write poetry, and they were making this incredible neural network produce things that looked like Tennyson. They were making early 19th century poetry using this machine. I said, you know, come on. I mean, why can’t you make it do something perverse and something strange? They were trying to wrangle, to squeeze money out of it. The only way that money could be made from some kind of poetry is if it actually looked like poetry. Then people would want to buy that machine because it was capable of writing poetry. I said, well, what are you feeding it? The neural network was being fed only really classic literature, which I actually happen to love. I like Tennyson, don’t have any problems with it, but they weren’t feeding it Gertrude Stein, or Cantos. So their taste was wrong, so it was just reifying some sort of stupid traditional notions of literature. They just didn’t have the imagination or the taste, or actually I want to call it perversity, to feed the machine stuff that would break it, because they couldn’t afford to break it. They needed to monetize it.
Artists have always been the best, really good at breaking things rather than trying to make something stable. Again, it goes back to the W.H. Auden quote that says poetry makes nothing happen, Its beauty is its lack of utility. So when you try to harness art to become useful, you betray its base quality. Its quality is to be useless. Poetry makes nothing happen. That’s why it’s beautiful in a culture where we’re so geared up toward productivity to make a space where nothing happens. That sounds really radical to me, and that’s the way I read Auden. It’s probably the wrong way to read it, but I really am inspired by that quote.
I did work with my students once on Mid Journey and we asked it to render just a regular pencil, a yellow, number two pencil, so the most basic fucking pencil, and Mid Journey could not do it. It kept putting like a finger on the end of the eraser. It couldn’t make a fucking pencil, which is OK, it’s cute, but it’s already cliche. The surrealism of the broken, the hands on AI. If I have to go into a gallery and see another hand with six fingers on it, I can’t. To me, it was just a sort of failure. But if I asked it to make an image of an orangutan on the moon playing golf, it was really perfect at that. So it couldn’t be so stupid as to make something normal, but it could be so stupid as to make something magical or surreal or incredible. So, I’m interested in the banality, and to me, all of this shit is incapable of doing what I’m interested in. I also think that uncreativity or perversity of any kind of avant garde or revolutionary ideas artistically are not being programmed into those machines. So they’re just reifying what the fuck else is there, not to mention racial and sexual prejudices that are already built in. So it’s just a reifying machine. I’m not so happy about it.
What: Future of Publishing
**Marta (01:13:14) **
What is the future of publishing? It’s a question that we’ve also not been maybe so happy with or that we’ve had our pushbacks on. I guess if you could have a say in where publishing goes, what would you say? Or do you see a future in publishing? What are your thoughts?
Kenneth (01:13:56)
I mean, publishing will continue. Look, it’s important to make these markers. You’re sitting behind a shelf full of books, those are not going away, right? But your Instagram posts are all going away. So, that kind of thing, even in a symbolic way, is really important. There’s something durational about these artifacts that we’re creating in paper artifacts. So I think it’s important to keep going, particularly the kind of work that Nero and our fellow types of publishers, alternative publishers like Nero are doing. Everybody’s writing books on these incredible machines that are constantly crashing and glitching, and yet when you go to the airport and try to buy a book, there’s no evidence of that digital trace in any of those books there. There’s no books that contain an actual glitch, right? So to me, that’s really false. Everybody’s pretending.
There was (a beautiful essay) [https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html], and I’m sure many of you have read it, that was published on a listserv million years ago by a guy called Matthew Fuller. The title is, “It looks like you’re writing a letter”. When you’re actually on Microsoft Word, you’re not writing a letter. You’re enacting so much, but there’s so much denial that we’re actually not writing on a typewriter. There’s no acknowledgement in mainstream publishing at all of the technology behind it. To me, this is this great motion of sense of denial.
So, I’m not publishing UbuWeb anymore. That’s done. It’s useless, really. I think it’s dumb. Although I just have to say one other thing. There was a moment in which I thought, why am I continuing to do UbuWeb when we have YouTube, right? Because a lot of stuff from UbuWeb was just being taken and thrown up on YouTube. I was seeing nice stuff on YouTube. Now, with everything else, I realize that I hate YouTube because all it is is ads now. I hate it. I won’t use it. UbuWeb doesn’t serve ads. You can actually watch a situationist film uninterrupted, so now I’m really realizing how precious that kind of thing is. So I keep reacting over the years to different technological changes.
Sometimes it feels like I’m really wrong, and why am I doing this? Then the culture and the environment changes, and I’m like, oh, yeah, I was right. That’s good, it’s still good. Then something else will happen where that changes again. So I just think that a vision like Nero is so beautiful. I’m really also curious about you guys in Ljubljana because I’m just outside of Trieste here. So I’m going to come see you in Ljubljana and see what you’re doing there.
I just think that the vision of, I’m just going to specifically say Nero because I know Nero and you’re there, but I mean it for anything else. Follow your vision. Your vision is right. Your vision is good. It’s always been good. It’s always been right. Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s so important that you do what you do. There are going to be times when it looks like, what the fuck, why are we still doing this? And having been publishing for 30 years on the digital platform through the beginning of the internet to what it is now, I’m really glad I stuck exactly with what I started doing. It was right. My impulse was right. It was good. It’s been a journey and the journey is not over. At the end of the day, you have to just keep doing what you’re doing, and don’t even question it. Because if you question it, it’s going to end. That’s what they really want, and they win. Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing beautiful, beautiful vision.
Tommaso (01:19:26)
**I actually want to just comment on what you just said. We started with a lot of negativity and we are concluding with a lot of positivity. I also feel sad when you say Ubuweb stopped. I can also understand where it comes from. So maybe the question is, why? **
I will try to apply the same positivity that you said before. We should actually keep on going with everything we are doing. I think there is one word that has come up a lot during all our discussion. It has to do with the sustainability of things. The proposal of federating, that the internet can also be this place in which work and labor can be shared, and things can be connected in a different way than platform is trying to convince us that they are. Have you ever had any thought about this idea of Federation of Networks?
It has to do with alternative social media. Something from 2010s and on, but then developed to (Mastodon) [https://mastodon.social/explore]. It is based on a technology that is called Federated Network. Basically, you can install the server on your own computer and run an instance. Then what you publish in that instance is shared with all the other instances around the world. So, it’s an internet within the internet. It’s like a recursive internet. But then in case of Mastodon and other platforms, they use a specific protocol that is called ActivityPub. It’s an open-source protocol that is actually working very well, to the extent that Zuckerberg decided to use it for Threads. I think the concept of Threadverse, apart from the specific technological object, it’s something that can also be taken as a theoretical object. We could try to think about how to shape the internet from a big tech to a minor tech. Our own computer or small computer at home can be a server, a place where we archive, but at the same time we share with others. I have the feeling that UbuWeb is an immensely valuable archive for people who don’t want to go on Youtube. I think there is a lot of value in creating islands, not isolated, but interconnected ones.
Kenneth (01:22:27)
UbuWeb, by the way, I want to say it’s never going away. Believe me. People like Marcel Mars and Dušan and all of our friends out there, Peter Sund and all of these people are making sure that UbuWeb never disappears. It’s just, right now, it can’t be added to, but that was a price we had to pay for independence and longevity. I had to choose between sort of continuing to update, continuing to expand. At this point, again, there’s more shit on UbuWeb than anybody can ever watch in the next 10 lifetimes. Do you know the Criterion channel? You know what this is, Criterion Films? They have, at any given time, about 2,500 films. UbuWeb has over 6,000 films, it’s so enormous that it’s OK.
It could get bigger, but it doesn’t actually, it’s kind of the same way I’m just feeling about my own publishing. It’s pretty good. I did a lot. Do I really need to do another few books? Do I really need to put up another 1,000 films on UbuWeb? I mean, why, at this point? So anyway, I do love this idea of federation. Wish it had been around in 1996.