Ubu.com ist Tod

June 21, 2005

As some of you might already know, Kenneth Goldsmith will no longer be updating the ubu.com site. The entire site will be archived on a university server in the near future -- hopefully it will be archived complete (I'm concerned that copyright laws will make this difficult) and with its present navigation, since universities are famously spotty when it comes to web design.

Kenny's taken down most of the navigation pages so if there's content on the site that you still want, you're going to have to type in the URL directly. For instance, though the homepage is just an empty tract of bad news, you can still access the two series of /ubu .pdfs. I suggest you download what you can now, since there's no telling when these will be available again.

http://www.ubu.com/ubu/
http://www.ubu.com/ubu/index_fall03.html

(I notice that Peter Manson's Adjunct is already missing -- I wonder if there was some conflict with the print publisher of this book that I haven't heard about. This is ironic as that was the book that touched off the series.)

Well, I was as surprised as anyone that Kenny decided to stop the site. It was an incredible achievement, truly unique, internationally acclaimed, a source for rich class assignments (Mac Wellman was going to devote an entire semester to the site), and it could have gone on growing for a long time, in several directions. He had just added a film archive, including work by Kennth Anger and Harry Smith that looked surprisingly good as Quicktimes.

We were working on a new seris of /ubu books as well. I'm not sure what to do with the material I've collected already -- probably nothing at this point, since I haven't had a lot of time to work on my web projects and I have no access to Quark. Well, fun while it lasted! I'm going to try to make the pdfs available from arras.net until the archived ubu gets its new fittings.