2. UbuWeb (ENG)
While the front sparkles with glamour and sexy commodities, the back door favors that which is economically worthless but historically priceless.
This issue of Internet Eggxplorer was born around a vision that sat with me for a few days after reading about it for the first time. In its original context, the vision served as a clever introduction to what the author of the book it comes from would later refer to as backdoor knowledge.
The story is about a surreal little loophole in the bureaucracy of the Museum of Modern Art. There’s a back door to the MoMA in New York City that few know about, completely hidden from the throngs filing through the main doors on Fifty-Third Street. No long queues, no exorbitant admission fees—just a modest desk staffed by a young intern scrolling through his phone. Sign the log, take the elevator to the top floor, and you’ll find the MoMA Library. A quiet place, easily overlooked. But in the late Seventies this library became the site of something radical. Clive Phillpot, chief librarian at the time, at one point decided that anyone could mail anything to the library. Whatever he received would automatically be accepted into MoMA’s permanent collection. No vetting, no bureaucracy, no pretense. It didn’t matter if the sender was a celebrated artist or an anonymous romantic with delusions of grandeur. If you mailed it in, it became part of MoMA.
The brilliance of it was how unnoticed it remained. Nobody at the front of the house had a clue this was happening. By the time administration and curatorial wing figured it out, it was too late to undo it. They weren’t about to dig through all the crates and boxes stacked up in storage or start erasing thousands of names from their database. So the stuff stayed. Some of it turned out to be valuable, and a few pieces now occasionally appear in exhibitions. But most of it is still sitting in some warehouse in Queens, untouched, as if the whole thing was just a very elaborate prank that got out of hand. Or some elaborate conceptual performance. Which, in a way, it was.
The backdoor is a powerful tool. While all eyes are elsewhere, magical things can happen in the back. The back door plays by its own rules. Unburdened by official policy, it can quietly reshuffle the deck according to intuition, whim and desire. While the front sparkles with glamour and sexy commodities, the back door favors that which is economically worthless but historically priceless. The backdoor is always open, its ideas are infinitely democratic, transferable, and replicable, as well as free to all. What begins as a hunch of proposition, over time becomes serious. Transforming the back door in the new front door.
In the spring of 2015 I was a senior in high school and was in the middle of an already year-long, ongoing online conversation with Riccardo Ancona (@olbos_), a close friend from a year behind mine. Tall, lanky, long-haired, holy, we saw each other after lunch every Tuesday, before the weekly editorial assembly of our school newspaper. These brief encounters secured the foundations of my own backdoor knowledge: he would name-drop a couple of renegade artists, provide some context and link some niche Youtube videos or Soundcloud files for me to catch up with. We would then meet on Facebook Messenger later in the evening to discuss about them until late.
He was only seventeen at the time, but already a respected and renowned brain in his year. I came from an extremely posh background and had changed school two years prior my final year, ending up in a public structure where the majority of the people who hanged out on its premises were exceptionally musically conscious. My overall sound knowledge was pretty “basic” at the time and my research skills poor. Riccardo candidly introduced me to names and relations as he discovered them himself, sharing what he thought was worth debating about, for the sake of having a good time discussing them together: pioneer Italian composer Luciano Berio, Lacan’s Seminaries, American Minimalism — Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich —, Italian experimental hip-hop duo Uochi Toki, Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale, academic papers on the cognitive effect of listening to background music on older adults, metal band Celtic Frost… The list is long and the partnership long-lived.
Once I’d adjusted to this new rummaging routine I became more focused not just on who was I listening to, but actively aware of sound. I floated through 2014 and great part of 2015 in the midst of a dreamlike, mystical narrative that was decidedly mine, enjoying being a teenage underdog, who knew nothing, but was actively building up her own niche sonic backdoor knowledge.
This is where the three concepts I live by in my practice defined themselves : wasting time on the internet, digital curating and learning about the peripheries of sound production through word of mouth.
By the end of 2016 I had started my first BA in Film Studies in Bologna. Riccardo was already touring Italy under the moniker Olbos, crashing on my couch every now and then if some of his favorite artists were playing in the city.
One of the last things we talked about was Walter Ruttmann, a German avant-garde film director, early practitioner of experimental film. I texted him asking if he knew anything about film directors playing with sound and he linked me Ruttmann’s Weekend and Francis Dhomont’s Forêt profonde. What had been a three year long conversation ended shortly after.
I have no idea if Riccardo was aware at the time, but what would have graced our scavenging process and enriched our backdoor awareness had already existed for about twenty years. Offline, in an old MacBook Pro hooked up to a wheezing four-terabyte hard drive in a drab room overlooking a gray alleyway in midtown Manhattan. Online, at ubu.com.
Coded in plain html, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb is the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the Internet.
By the letter of the law, the site is illegal. They openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Nearly everything on the site has been copied, ripped, or appropriated from elsewhere before being reposted. Yet they’ve never been sued, never even came close. It also functions on no money—they don’t take it, they don’t pay it, they don’t touch it. They never featured an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box, nor did they ever apply for a grant or accepted a sponsorship. They remain happily unaffiliated, keeping the website free and clean since its foundation, in 1996. Server space and bandwidth are donated by a likeminded group of intellectual custodians who believe in free access to knowledge, a gift economy of plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education.
The MoMA incident is what American poet and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith uses as a key metaphor to introduce the website’s backbone: backdoor knowledge. The parallel is traced in the introductory chapter of Duchamp Is My Lawyer, an extensive manifesto he published in 2020 in which he tracks down the polemics, pragmatics and poetics of this shadow library.
What Goldsmith lays out in this apologia of ethical digital piracy, without ever really moralizing about it, is how traditional gatekeepers have lost control of the narrative. UbuWeb was built as an antidote to academic exclusivity, a dumpster fire of under-the-radar insight that burns brightly in the shadow of institutional pretensions. He is frank in describing its foundation as inevitable: the only way to truly preserve avant-garde work was to put it online, free for anyone to access.
The website is structured as an intentionally sprawling, non-hierarchical repository. Its design is simple and unadorned, resembling the early internet ethos of functionality over aesthetics. Content is organized across broad categories, like Ethnopoetics, Conceptual Writing or Electronic Music Resources, with each section containing subcategories or archives of works by individual artists, movements, or themes.
Its simplicity is both a strength and a limitation. It lacks search optimization or extensive metadata, making navigation feel chaotic or exploratory rather than methodical. But this design reflects a specific mission: to create an open, un-curated digital space where discovery is a personal expedition. Subpages often feature downloadable files, embedded media players, and written descriptions or essays contextualizing the works. At its core, UbuWeb functions more as a living archive than a conventional library, encouraging users to lose themselves in its vast, eclectic collection rather than seek a specific piece with precision.
Everything is accessible, nothing is sacred. The "important" exists alongside what some might deem "trivial," reflecting not the flattening of culture but how we now engage with it in a postpostpost era. What makes UbuWeb compelling—romantic, even—is its refusal to care about these distinctions. It is the ultimate Duchampian gesture, rejecting the notion that culture requires filtering by authority before being labeled as such.
Unlicensed and unregulated, this ethos isn’t a mere feature of UbuWeb. It’s its whole point. In a digital landscape shaped by algorithms, paywalls, and corporate oversight, UbuWeb serves as a defiant reminder of the internet’s original promise: democratization and unfiltered exploration.
But what makes UbuWeb worthy of attention isn’t just its content—the rare, the weird, the forgotten—but the way it is structured, since it isn’t curated in the traditional sense. It’s accumulated, scavenged, compiled. It’s a perfect expression of digital curatorship, where praxis isn’t about discernment or expertise but about the sheer act of accumulation. The value of what’s collected comes later, in the way it’s used, recontextualized, or ignored.
Goldsmith doesn’t curate for the front door. He curates for the margins, for the things that would otherwise fall through the cracks. But those margins have the potential to ripple outward, reshaping everyday conversations through word of mouth. Someone stumbles across an obscure sound piece, shares it with a friend, and suddenly it’s part of the cultural discourse in a way that feels organic and almost accidental.
Proven beyond doubt that word of mouth has always been central to how we discover what has the potential to resonate more than what we are fed, what’s different now is the scale and speed of it. The internet amplifies those whispers from the periphery into a cacophony, but it also makes it easier to miss the signal in the noise. UbuWeb exists somewhere in that paradox: a place where the obscure can flourish but also where the act of discovery still feels personal. It’s the antithesis of the algorithm, a space where taste isn’t endured but stumbled upon. An ultimate act of defiance.
By the time you read this, UbuWeb will no longer be active. As of the beginning of 2024, however, the archive is online and preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.
Today Riccardo is a respected sound artist, teacher and PhD researcher of algorithmic practices, as I read from his website. I reached out to him exactly one year ago and asked him if he knew about UbuWeb at all. He didn’t, but was happy to make up for lost time. Here are his ten top picks from the website, ten years later.
Inuit Vocal Games
Trevor Wishart - Red Bird
Beatriz Ferreyra - Demeures Aquatiques
Conlon Nancarrow - Complete Studies for Player Piano
Harry Partch Memorial
Eliane Radigue - Trilogie de la Mort
Jean-Claude Risset - Mutations
Pierre Schaeffer - Solfège de l’objet Sonore
Gottfried Michael Koenig - The use of computer programmes in creating music
Ketjak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant
Olbos mentioned piango 😭🙏