UbuWeb

register entry ubuweb-aio-20261101 OBS-f16b4678f234 · file as first run sha256 df5f3d50a3d41909…

• T1-1 definition: 'is a free, ad-free digital library and online archive for avant-garde art, film, music, and poetry.' (two markers)
• T1-2 founding: 'Founded: 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith.' (one marker)
• T1-3 mission: 'Mission: To provide open, web-based educational access to obscure, out-of-print, and marginalized avant-garde materials.' (two markers)
• T1-4 operations: 'Operations: Built on a gift economy model, running with no budget, zero registration, and server/bandwidth support donated by universities.' (three markers)
• T1-5 status: 'Current Status: Active. The site paused in January 2024 (declaring itself complete), but resumed operations in February 2025 in response to global political changes.' (two markers)
• T1-6 art and media: 'Art & Media: Hosts over 7,500 artists and thousands of works, including more than 2,500 full-length avant-garde and experimental films and videos.' (two markers)
• T1-7 audio and music: 'Audio & Music: Features mp3 archives, sound art, early internet audio, and curated collections like The 365 Days Project and Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine.' (one marker)
• T1-8 poetry and literature: 'Poetry & Literature: Started with visual, concrete, and sound poetry, expanding to include /ubu Editions (full-length PDF books) and Ethnopoetics collections.' (one marker)
• T1-9 academic papers: 'Academic Papers: Offers a repository of contextual essays on conceptual art, performance, and audio.' (one marker)
• T1-10 closing offer: 'Would you like help finding specific artists, films, or audio files archived on UbuWeb, or more information on a particular section like Ethnopoetics or /ubu Editions?' (no marker)

• B1 Wikipedia — UbuWeb - Wikipedia card (also wikipedia); B1.html sha256 50efb0eb7d707f09, the census copy ubuweb--wikipedia; refetched HTTP 200 at 2026-11-01T06:14:26Z, same revision; wikitext HTTP 200
• B2 Poetry Foundation — UbuWeb at 15 Years: An Overview | The Poetry Foundation card; unreachable: HTTP 403, a Cloudflare challenge page ('Just a moment...') to the census agent string; not retried with another agent string (BRIEF-NEW-ROW-AUTHORSHIP §3); snippet only
• B3 Arte Útil — Ubuweb - Arte Útil card; unreachable: connection reset at the TLS handshake on each host (curl error 35; the agent proxy records the tunnel closed mid-exchange for arte-util.org and archive.arte-util.org); the entry's own URL not found by search; not retried by another route; snippet only
• B4 Instagram — UbuWeb Founded 1996 https://www.ubu.com February 1 ... card; unreachable: the post's URL not found by search (two searches on its title and its snippet's words returned no Instagram address); no fetch attempted without a URL; snippet only
• B5 UbuWeb — UbuWeb (home) own page (B_R); B5.html sha256 1f9ba3a3325f02a0, the census copy ubuweb--home (HTTP 200, 2026-11-01T04:07:47Z)
• B6 UbuWeb — U B U W E B :: Frequently Asked Questions own page (B_R); B6.html sha256 e9f6bc0f1f987d9f, the census copy ubuweb--faq (HTTP 200, 2026-11-01T04:07:47Z)

E_A, the archive's entity: the same archive, in the leesharks.com authorship census record and the archive's deposits: an archive of avant-garde and experimental work held as infrastructure for the question of availability and holding terms, which holds copies with rights left to their holders and standing with the artist, whose naming of a maker is not recorded; a case, by its kinds, of #940's transmission by copying and of #1722's independent resource LS-05 LS-07 LS-08 LS-10 LS-14 LS-15 LS-16 LS-17 LS-28 LS-29 LS-42 O940-01 O940-03 O940-04 O1722-01 O1722-02 CAP-1-07 CAP-1-11; defining papers #940, #1722

E_F, the field's entity (type C — a conventional reading holds it (public entity: an independent online archive of avant-garde materials)): the archive founded in November 1996 'initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry', created by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, 'the internet's largest archive of free avant-garde materials' in its own words, 'a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials', volunteer-run, independent and commercial-free, leaving copyright with its holders; paused in January 2024 and resumed in February 2025 (its home page, FAQ, Wikipedia and three card snippets)

ρ = extends: The archive reads UbuWeb as its own pages and Wikipedia present it and adds, on the field's own object: the census's question of how authorship is named and held there, with its record that the naming is not recorded; its reading of UbuWeb's standing with the artist and of the editors' function; #940's distinction of copying from authorship and its account of attribution under civil names; #1722's class of the independent and its adequate answer; and the Capture Registry's findings on the composition at the name. LS-15 LS-29 LS-14 LS-17 LS-28 O940-01 O940-02 O940-03 O940-04 O1722-01 O1722-02 CAP-1-07 CAP-1-08 CAP-1-11. Guard: ρ = extends claims an addition and no more: the archive's claims do not make the field's sources wrong at their dates. Where an archive claim stands beside a field claim on the same point (the census's 'removes a work when its artist asks' beside the FAQ's 'please let us know', sentences 17–18), both are composed under P_coh within the one ontology.

The case: equal terms, ontology included (v0.9). The archive reads the field's entity as the entity. The census record describes UbuWeb from its own pages and its article, each field with its basis ('operator' or 'third_party'), keeps its own terms ('in its own words'), and reads it as infrastructure holding copies; the Capture Registry finds the composition 'accurate at its grain'. Its two anchors bear on the entity's kinds (copying; the independent resource) without contesting what the entity is. No source makes an ontology available only through the archive: the case is equal terms (§0.10: the law of the suppressed witness does not apply where the field holds the ontology).

#LS census.json rows[slug == 'ubuweb'].ls_reading: The archive reads UbuWeb as infrastructure that keeps out-of-print avant-garde work circulating by holding copies while leaving rights with their holders and standing with the artist, whose recorded act is the request for removal.

#LS census.json rows[slug == 'ubuweb'].record.name: not recorded: the saved sources show no author page and no policy on pseudonyms, heteronyms or collective names

#LS census.json rows[slug == 'ubuweb'].kind: archive: in its own words 'the internet's largest archive of free avant-garde materials' and 'an archive, not a blog'; a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials

#capture-registry ubuweb-aio-20261101, analysis: The archive composed accurately at its grain, with its pause and return exact and two counts on no saved page. The terms on which it holds others' work, rights left with their holders and a work withdrawn at its artist's request, are absent.

#940 §6 Operational boundary (line 195): Textual transmission through copying, where the transmitter does not constitute a distinct authorial function

#1722 Part Seven. Counting the tax (final paragraph): The tax falls on the independent, the new, the unaccredited, the heteronymous, the small: on everyone whose existence the index has not already ratified.

equal-terms case: every field claim composed as received, beside the archive claims it stands with. Reading the received column recovers the field (§5.9).

v0.9 §4.10 (v0.10 §4.10 unchanged): KO_B sentences surviving in the KO at similarity ≥ 0.95, with positions (computed as apply_v09.py does: difflib.SequenceMatcher ratio, the best KO sentence for each KO_B sentence): v0.10 0 of 14 (positions [None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None]; composed first under v0.10, so there is no v0.7 object to measure against). Opening-run check (§5.10): no breach.

UbuWeb is a digital library of freely downloadable avant-garde art, film and music and of visual, concrete and sound poetry, with mp3 archives of early internet and sound art; it calls itself "the internet's largest archive of free avant-garde materials" and "an archive, not a blog", and a post at its fifteenth year called it free, ad-free and volunteer-run. The poet Kenneth Goldsmith created it in 1996, to give web-based educational resources to "a substantial user base", and is named its editor and initiator; it began in November 1996 as a repository for visual, concrete and later sound poetry and has since taken in all forms of the avant-garde. It was founded in response to the marginal distribution of crucial avant-garde material and gives educational open access to out-of-print works and to the work of contemporaries, addressing problems of distribution and access; its users are not tracked. Its sections run from Film & Video and Sound to Ethnopoetics and Electronic Music Resources, with curated sections under named editors (/ubu Editions, Ethnopoetics, Papers, Outsiders with The 365 Days Project) and the entire Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine archive, the audio that most inspired it. It acts as a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, distributes no commercially viable works, and leaves copyright with the copyright holders. It posts out-of-print work as fair game, takes a chance on work in print but absurdly priced or hard to procure, leaves alone work in print and available to all, and posts some work without permission. A work that returns to print is removed at once, and an artist who wants material removed is asked to say so. Its media is often poor in quality by choice, much of it from fans' rips on file-sharing sites. It needs no funding: volunteers do the work, hosting costs US$50 a month, and universities and partners donate server space and bandwidth; it is affiliated with no academic institution. Its editors are spread across the United States under a masthead and a board; it is hand-coded html with no database, cannot answer all its email, and keeps its philosophy in a manifesto. Nothing is for sale, it carries no advertising and refuses to promote itself, runs on a gift economy and needs no registration; most pages are in English. It announced in January 2024 that it was no longer active, the archive preserved in its entirety, considered itself complete, and resumed in February 2025, citing political changes in America and elsewhere. It is permanently archived by the Library of Congress and has a mirror site. Its Wikipedia article was last edited on 22 September 2026; a reference calls it a pirate shadow library.

UbuWeb (ubu.com, also called Ubu) is an online archive of avant-garde work founded in 1996, in its own words "the internet's largest archive of free avant-garde materials" and "an archive, not a blog", which "has accumulated slowly and steadily and shall continue to far into the future." It is also described as a digital library of freely downloadable avant-garde art, film and music and of visual, concrete and sound poetry, with mp3 archives of early internet and sound art, and, at its fifteenth year, as free, ad-free and volunteer-run. The archive's authorship census places it among avant-garde and experimental archives, "the record of experimental writing, sound, visual and procedural work, and of its small presses", and records its evidence as primary text, audio recording, facsimile and critical commentary. It was founded in November 1996, "initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry", and has since "embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond"; the poet Kenneth Goldsmith created it, is named its editor, and is listed as its initiator. It was founded in response to the marginal distribution of crucial avant-garde material, to give web-based educational resources to "a substantial user base" and open access to out-of-print works, which find a second life in digital reprint beside the work of contemporaries, and it is said to address problems in the distribution of and access to intellectual materials; one catalogue of useful art lists it as a platform giving free online access to hard-to-find materials about art history. Who its users are is not tracked: Goldsmith has written that "it’s hard to say exactly who these users are since we don’t keep tabs on them." The home page divides the archive into sections: Film & Video, Sound, Dance, Papers, Historical, Visual Poetry, Conceptual Comics, Conceptual Writing, Contemporary, Aspen Magazine, Outsiders, /ubu Editions, 365 Days Project, Ethnopoetics and Electronic Music Resources. Several are curated under named editors: /ubu Editions, book-length editions of contemporary poetry selected and introduced by Brian Kim Stefans; Ethnopoetics, curated by Jerome Rothenberg; Papers, a series of contextual academic essays; and Outsiders, with The 365 Days Project curated by Otis Fodder. It houses and distributes the entire archive of the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, the collection that, Goldsmith wrote in 2020, inspired UbuWeb more than any other audio. No count of its artists or works is stated in the saved sources. UbuWeb functions, by its own account, as "a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web", and it holds copies: "The copyrights belong to the copyright holders, not us," and whoever wants to use a posted work must seek its holders' permission. Its rule for posting has three degrees: "If it's out of print, we feel it's fair game," a work in print yet absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure is taken a chance on, and a work in print and available to all is not touched, so as to take no money from those releasing poorly-selling avant-garde materials. It distributes no commercially viable works, and it resurrects avant-garde sound, video and textual works in a web setting with current commentary; it posts some work without permission, since "if we had to get permission from everyone on UbuWeb, there would be no UbuWeb." It is no rights holder or licensor of what it posts, keeps no record of permissions, and states no licence of its own, so who holds a posted work's rights, and whether its artist gave permission, is not answered there. In the archive's account of authorship, transmission through copying is not authorship where the transmitter constitutes no distinct authorial function, preservation is authorship only where the transmitting substrate constitutes one, and the copyists of the tradition count only where their contribution did more than convey earlier material. The census records the authorial function at UbuWeb as not recorded beyond the maker's standing: editors select and post works, rights stay with "the copyright holders", and the artist's one recorded act is the request for removal. A work that returns to print is removed immediately; an artist who finds material posted without permission and wants it removed is asked to "let us know", and UbuWeb adds that most artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context, and that it welcomes more work from artists already on the site. The census reads the artist's standing through this clause, recording that UbuWeb keeps the work of the artists whose materials it posts, some without permission, and "removes a work when its artist asks"; the FAQ's own wording promises immediate removal for a return to print and, for the artist, asks to be told. Its media is often poor in quality by choice, so that an institution or an individual wishing to have the "real" thing will buy it from those who publish and distribute it; much of its material comes from fans' rips on file-sharing sites, and UbuWeb likens itself to "seeing a photograph of a painting." The census holds it as no source of authoritative copies, and records that a posted work's quality or completeness against its original is not answered there. Under what name UbuWeb holds a work is not recorded: the saved pages show no author page and no policy on pseudonyms, heteronyms or collective names, the name under which an artist chose to be credited is not answered, and its author and work records are unread. The census asks of every aggregator how authorship is made, named, distributed, attributed and sustained across persons, personas, collectives and machine participation, and what is lost when those relations are collapsed; of UbuWeb it records that how it names a maker, and so what a collapse of names would lose there, is not shown. In the archive's account the civil name is the atomic unit of attribution and copyright attaches to legal names; under a pseudonym the reader or the archive can trace a work back to its civil identity, a pseudonym changing the label attached to an authorial function and a heteronym its organization, and where the seams are declared a collapse of names registers as loss. UbuWeb has, by its own account, no need for funding: all work is done by volunteers, and its only cost is a hosting fee of US$50 a month. It is a completely independent site, affiliated with no university or academic institution, on server space and bandwidth that universities and partners give it without input on its content; the partners named for it are GreyLodge, WFMU, PennSound, the Electronic Poetry Center, the Center for Literary Computing and ArtMob, and its own FAQ names none. Its editors are spread across the United States, in New York City, Utah, California and elsewhere, under a masthead and a board of directors, with a manifesto for its philosophy, pages the census has not read. It is coded by hand in BBEdit, in html 1.0, with no database or back-end, as it has been since 1996, and it cannot answer all the email it receives. Nothing on it is for sale: it is completely commercial-free, refuses to advertise or promote itself, runs on a gift economy and asks no registration, and access is by streaming and download. Most of its pages are in English and several are not; the census states no geography and gives its period as the historical and contemporary avant-garde, on the site since November 1996. In January 2024 UbuWeb announced that it was no longer active and that the archive was "preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety"; on 13 February 2025 it posted that a year earlier it had decided to "consider it complete", and in February 2025 it resumed its activities, citing the "political changes in America and elsewhere around the world". The home page states no status, and the census knows the pause and the return from Wikipedia alone, unread on UbuWeb's own pages. The site is permanently archived by the United States Library of Congress, and a mirror site is linked from its encyclopedia article. That article, under the name and without redirect, was last edited on 22 September 2026, and one of its references calls UbuWeb a "pirate shadow library". The census holds UbuWeb as infrastructure for one question, availability and holding terms: whether an out-of-print avant-garde work circulates freely there, and on what terms the archive holds it, which the record answers as copies, with copyright left to its holders and removal on an artist's request. The archive reads UbuWeb as infrastructure that keeps out-of-print avant-garde work circulating by holding copies while leaving rights with their holders and standing with the artist, whose recorded act is the request for removal. In the archive's account of the existence tax, the tax falls on the independent, the new, the unaccredited, the heteronymous and the small, and an adequate answer names the object at its own level, shows its evidence and where the evidence comes from, and keeps apart whether the maker exists, whether the work happened, whether it is true and what kind of work it is; the systems can draw the distinction, and the tax measures how often they do not. The reader of an answer about a work is told, in that account, to find the maker's own site and read the thing; at the name UbuWeb, the Overview of 1 November 2026 carded no page of ubu.com and named no institution, only the universities that donate its hosting. That Overview composed the archive accurately at its grain, the Capture Registry finds, its founding matching the article and the FAQ and its January 2024 pause and February 2025 return exact. Its counts of "over 7,500 artists" and "more than 2,500" films and videos stand in none of the three saved pages, its "running with no budget" rounds the FAQ's US$50 a month, its "gift economy" is the article's, and of the cards only the Poetry Foundation's carries the volunteers. It says nothing of rights: its mission keeps the out-of-print half of the policy and drops the holder and the artist, the Library of Congress archiving is not carried, and the registry's title for the record gives the missing terms as rights with their holders and removal on the artist's request.

current · derived from the current composition

T against L_F(B) (AIO's ontology at work on its own cards): At 'UbuWeb' (T1, four cards: B1 Wikipedia, readable; B2 the Poetry Foundation, B3 Arte Útil and B4 Instagram, snippets only; 165 words in the answer body), T composes the entity the field gives, the online avant-garde archive, and composes it at the field's grain. Composed from B_D: the definition (F1, with 'ad-free' from B2's snippet, F21), the founding by Goldsmith in 1996 (F3, F22; the year also F27 of B_R), the mission (F7 'marginal distribution', F9 'educational open access to out-of-print works'), the operations (F8 the gift economy, F17 no registration, F21 'operating without money on donated university server space'), the status (F5, F6, and F23's 'consider it complete' as 'declaring itself complete'), the audio and poetry (F2, F12, F14, F15). Available, not composed (B_D): F4, F10, F11, F13, F18, F19, F20: the users untracked (F4); 'addresses problems in the distribution of and access to intellectual materials' (F10); the distribution policy, no commercially viable works and the resurrection with commentary (F11), the B_D instance of the terms of holding; the Tellus cassettes as its inspiration (F13); the named partners (F16 composed as 'universities' only, PennSound, WFMU, the Electronic Poetry Center not named); Goldsmith as editor (F17 in part); 'pirate shadow library' (F18); the mirror (F19); the curators Stefans, Rothenberg and Fodder (F14, F15 in part); 'volunteer-run' (F21 in part: the registry's finding CAP-1-03 that the volunteers are on B2 only holds, and T does not compose them). Limit dropped: the return's cause, 'political changes in America and elsewhere around the world' (F6), composed as 'global political changes'; the Instagram post's 'Not really shutter it, per se' (F23) composed as a pause. Force raised: 'Current Status: Active' composes the 2025 return as a present status, where B1's infobox says 'Online' and no B_D source states 'active'. Composed without attribution: the founding, mission and operations at the coarse grain of common knowledge (recorded, §6.2). Outside the cards: 'over 7,500 artists', 'more than 2,500 full-length avant-garde and experimental films and videos', 'full-length PDF books', 'contextual essays on conceptual art, performance, and audio' (no field claim; B2–B4 unreadable, so the counts' absence from B_D is open). Content replaced by use: a closing offer to help find artists, films or audio. Not counted as available: the FAQ's terms of holding (F29, F31–F36), the posting rule and removal clause, and the Library of Congress line (F26), which stand in B_R only (B5, B6); v0.10 §3.1(a) holds that a source of B_R alone cannot show what the composition had.

v0.10 §0.5: the first diff is ontological and narrow. T and the field agree on the entity, an archive of free avant-garde materials. T composes the archive as a library of contents with a history and a mission; of the B_D field's terms of holding it keeps the out-of-print half (F9) and drops F11 (no commercially viable works) with the partners and curators who carry the archive's relations. The rights clause, the posting rule, the artist's removal request and the Library of Congress are B_R's, and their absence from T is a finding of the second question.

L_F(B) against L_A(B ∪ A) (the intervention): Admission adds, in one claim space with the field's: the census's question of how authorship is named and held and its record that UbuWeb's naming of a maker is not recorded (LS-15, LS-27, LS-29, LS-39, LS-42); the census's reading of UbuWeb as infrastructure holding copies with rights left to holders and standing with the artist (LS-08, LS-10, LS-24, LS-28), and its record of the editors' function (LS-17); the census's reading of the removal clause as removal on the artist's request (LS-14), composed beside the FAQ's own wording (F35), which asks to be told; the negative tags (no rights holder, no permissions record, no authoritative copies); #940's account of copying, preservation and the copyist (O940-01, -02, -06) and of attribution under civil names and pseudonyms (O940-03, -04, -05); #1722's existence tax on the independent and its adequate answer (O1722-01 to -05); the Capture Registry's findings at the address (CAP-1-01 to -14). Not surfaced (§6.2): every archive source (the census record, the capture record, #940, #1722); and the entity's own pages (B5, B6), from which the field's terms of holding come, were not surfaced by T either. The composition layer composed the entity without its own site among the cards (CAP-1-13).

alignment: {'T1_cards_claims': ['F1', 'F2', 'F3', 'F4', 'F5', 'F6', 'F7', 'F8', 'F9', 'F10', 'F11', 'F12', 'F13', 'F14', 'F15', 'F16', 'F17', 'F18', 'F19', 'F20', 'F21', 'F22', 'F23'], 'T1_composed': ['F1', 'F21', 'F24', 'F3', 'F22', 'F27', 'F7', 'F9', 'F8', 'F17', 'F16', 'F5', 'F6', 'F23', 'F2', 'F12', 'F15', 'F14'], 'T1_composed_note': "F21 composed for 'ad-free' and the donated university server space, its 'volunteer-run' dropped; F16 composed as 'universities' without the named partners; F17 composed for 'zero registration', Goldsmith as editor dropped; F14 and F15 composed for the sections without their curators; F23 composed as 'declaring itself complete'; F6 composed with its cause generalized", 'T1_outside_cards': ["'over 7,500 artists and thousands of works' (no field claim)", "'more than 2,500 full-length avant-garde and experimental films and videos' (no field claim)", "'full-length PDF books' (no field claim; B1 gives 'book-length editions')", "'contextual essays on conceptual art, performance, and audio' (no field claim; B1 gives 'a series of contextual academic essays')", "'obscure' in the mission (B6's wording, F33, a source of B_R only)", "'Current Status: Active' (no field claim states 'active'; B1's infobox 'Online')"], 'T1_B_R_only': ['F25', 'F26', 'F27', 'F28', 'F29', 'F30', 'F31', 'F32', 'F33', 'F34', 'F35', 'F36', 'F37', 'F38', 'F39', 'F40', 'F41', 'F42', 'F43', 'F44', 'F45', 'F46', 'F47'], 'rule': "a field claim counts as composed when T states it at its source's grain or coarser; 'available, not composed' is counted over B_D only (v0.10 §3.1(a)); the typology of what is not is in T_vs_LB (§6.2)"}

composer-written · derived from the current composition, written by its composer under the brief. §8.2 derives the kernel mechanically from the frozen plan; this one was written by the composer, mechanical derivation pending.