Back in May of 2000, I received the following email at UbuWeb:

I can't imagine that much of UbuWeb's materials are available in Meredith's local library. Chances are that they don't have too good a collection of sound poetry and I'll bet that their concrete poetry section is lacking as well. Odds are that the local bookstore isn't chockfull of this stuff either. If Meredith was ambitious, she might try searching the web and buying these items online. But then she'd have to fork out $125 to buy a used copy of Emmett Williams' An Anthology of Concrete Poetry or $90 to purchase the newly released OU Revue box set, that compiles the entire run of the legendary French sound poetry magazine from the 1960s. Those two items comprise only the tip the iceberg of what's available for free on UbuWeb, right in the comfort of her own living room.

Meredith's note succinctly summed up everything that I had wished to achieve with UbuWeb: that of a distribution point for out of print, hard-to-find, small run, obscure materials, available at no cost from any point on the globe. Although the technologies of the web are continually developing in terms of sophistication, UbuWeb embraces the distributive possibilities inherent in the web's original technologies: call it radical forms of distribution.

I was introduced to concrete, visual and sound poetry in the late 80s when Ruth and Marvin Sackner purchased an artwork of mine and brought me down to their Miami archive to install it. Although I was smack in the middle of the New York art world operating as a text artist, I had never been exposed to concrete and visual poetry. At the time, it was a thoroughly invisible practice, especially for someone like myself, immersed in the more New York-centric canonical text art of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Joseph Kosuth, just to name a few. Fluxus had come to the New York art world's attention around this time and through the marketing hype surrounding it, we had become familiar with some of the less ephemeral gestures and a few of the names surrounding the movement. But still, innovative poetry was far outside the purview of the heated Soho art scene.

Upon leaving the Sackners, my view and practice was changed. I was impressed by to the delights I encountered there and was thrilled to become acquainted with unfamiliar names like Bernard Heidsieck, Joel Hubat and Gerhard Rühm.

When I got back to New York, I immediately began hunting around bookstores to acquire as much of it as I could, which proved to be a difficult undertaking. Generally produced in small, poorly distributed editions during the 60s and 70s, there was not much available. The same proved true for sound poetry, by then a seemingly moribund genre. Over the next decade, though, through a confluence of interests -- pop culture, nostalgia, the marketplace, and the web -- this situation would radically change. Also, little did I know then, back in the early 90s, the thing that would come be called UbuWeb would figure so prominently in this revival.

Over the next 5 years or so I had managed to track down a small but seminal collection of books, journals, LPs and tapes of concrete and sound poetry. I was using the books as inspirational material for my own work and the sound poetry as fodder for my weekly radio show when, in January 1996, a friend showed me Netscape. The first image I saw appear on the screen was a slowly unfurling interlaced gif. And as the text and image filled in with alternating lines, it reminded me of sequential movement poems like Jean François Bory's "The worldWord is…", which resembles the pages of a flipbook. Over the next few months, the proliferation of slick graphic images on the web --- most often used for advertising -- brought to mind concrete works like bp Nichol's "Eyes" from the mid 60s or Décio Pignitari's "beba coca cola" from the late 50s.

UbuWeb was launched in November of 1996. It was natural to want to move my collection to the web. Scanning the images and seeing them backlit by the computer screen made everything seem fresh, as did the recontextualization of the work. Freed from the dusty bookstores and flea markets, sprung forth from their yellowing pages, these images were revitalized; concrete poetry was once again in dialogue with contemporary culture.

There was something formally astonishing about the way that the computer screen and concrete poetry seemed to naturally work together. It was a fulfillment of concrete poetry's original premise. In 1958, the Brazilian Noigandres group set a definition of concrete poetry: "[the] tension of thing-words in space-time." When we look at early concrete poetry manifestos, we can't help but recognize this web environment. The laundry list of physical attributes the Noigandres group found inspiring from various poetic precursors is astounding in how much of it addresses the space of the screen:

As early as 1968, Mary Ellen Solt noted the relationship between commercial graphics and concrete poetry in her introduction to her book Concrete Poetry a World View:

The early concrete poet's hard-line allegiance to modernism adapts itself perfectly to the flat mediums of the interface and the screen. They adhered closely to Greenbergian modernist tenets such as non-illusionistic space and full autonomy of the artwork. Looking though examples of early concrete works, in fact, none are illusionistic; instead, unadorned sans-serif language inhabits the plane of the white page and, as Greenberg says, "[the] shapes flatten and spread in the dense, two-dimensional atmosphere." In doing so, the emotional temperature is intentionally kept cool, controlled and rational, perfectly adapting itself to the environment of the computer.

The interface design of UbuWeb is intentionally modeled to emphasize these same qualities: flat, cool and minimal. Illusionistic depth-of-space, 3D modeling and decoration of any sort is avoided. UbuWeb's form perfectly fits its function.

UbuWeb proudly has no parent company: no one can pull our plug. We don't have a board of directors: no one can tell us what to do. We don't accept funding or donations of any sort: money will not make or break us. UbuWeb will remain as it is far into the future: available and free.

It's an important point. We're insistent on stressing our freedom and independence at every turn. For example, for many years, I've worked in the web industry, often for large corporate clients. One of the big concerns that continually arises is the issue of screen "real estate." For-profit enterprises are intent on dividing up and assigning commercial value to every pixel on the screen; not an inch is left unclaimed. In its interface design, UbuWeb intentionally works against these tendencies. UbuWeb wants as much unfettered, unassigned free space as it can offer. It's a metaphor for the strictly anti-commercial position that we stake.

Another example: Recently at dinner, a museum curator told me how much she liked UbuWeb but suggested that the site might be more useful if it had a clear description or mission statement on the front page. Although I understood what she was trying to say, this is just the thing that UbuWeb has been trying to avoid. The beauty of UbuWeb is that it doesn't have to be anything. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from any sort of bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves.

The economics of UbuWeb are very simple: it costs $50 a month to run. (The publication fee from this chapter alone will keep UbuWeb up and running for almost the next two years).To date we host the work of over 850 artists, comprised of approximately 12,000 files, weighing in at over 50 gigabytes (much of which is MP3 files residing on space generously donated by the EPC). UbuWeb is a model gift economy, reflecting the general economy of the materials presented on the site. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away.

UbuWeb, however, is not a free-for-all open resource. It's a strictly edited archive reflecting the point of view of a group of curators. Most submissions received are rejected. We have no publishing schedule, no deadlines to meet. Sections are updated at the leisure of the editors.

To date our sections include Historical, Contemporary, Sound, Papers, and Found + Insane. We're continually adding new sections, each with its own curator who has autonomous control of what appears there. Looking forward, we're adding several new sections. This Fall, for example, Jerome Rothenberg curated UbuWeb's new Ethnopoetics section, which includes poems, visuals, papers and a vast amount of audio files that Jerry has selected, drawing from his almost half-century of knowledge.

Brian Kim Stefans has been given his own e-book series on UbuWeb, /ubu Editions, publishing book-length works in PDF format, which will be launching in November. Brian has selected works by 7 writers of varying ages for the first installment of his series. These books, a mix of reprints and brand new works, aren't visual or concrete in any way; instead, they're straight text-based poetry.

This winter, Andrew Stafford will make available the entire contents of the legendary avant-garde cross-disciplinary 1960s arts magazine Aspen, featuring works - literary, visual, verbal, filmic, and audio - by everyone from Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, to George Maciunas and Dan Graham.

Also this winter, the poet Alec Finlay will be supplying UbuWeb with the full run of his award-winning PocketBooks, featuring all Scottish poets. He'll also be offering us hours of audio that were produced for the series.

As you can see, UbuWeb has moved far from its beginnings as a repository for visual, concrete and sound poetry. In fact, recently, we dropped the suffix "poetry" from our name. We're now simply UbuWeb. UbuWeb is becoming a clearinghouse of the avant-garde with few set boundaries, something that the web sorely needs. And why not? By unfettering ourselves from the obligation of just presenting one sort of poetry, or just limiting ourselves to only poetry, we open ourselves up to worlds of new ideas, all of which are easily absorbed under UbuWeb's scalable umbrella.

Outside of the general editorship of UbuWeb, I've been mostly involved with growing and curating the Sound section. Like the rest of UbuWeb, the Sound section used to be called "Sound Poetry" but has expanded to include anything that might fall under the rubric of sound art, artists recordings, rants and raves and of course, sound poetry. When we started, most of our files were in RealAudio, but we quickly moved away from it due to its proprietary nature. We've now embraced the open-sourced MP3 format, which nobody owns. As a result, we feel confident that our files will be able to be played on any number of players and on all platforms far into the future.

To date, over 500 artists are featured in the section, making it by far, the largest part of UbuWeb. In it there are original recordings by historical figures like Vito Acconci, Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp; and by important contemporary practitioners such as Kristin Oppenheim and Christian Bök. Of the technically superior MP3 files, our strict policy is not to encode any sound file that's currently available commercially. We don't wish to take whatever little money there is to be made out of the pockets of small publishers who put this stuff out on CD. The result has been a treasure trove of hard-to-find collector rarities.

Our Sound section is also the most popular section of UbuWeb, which is no surprise seeing the immense interest in MP3 file-sharing over the past few years. What does shock me, however, is that enormous numbers of people are actually interested in avant-garde sound works. But what I'm learning is that while many of these people are enjoying and studying these files as is, many others are using them as source material for new compositions, remixes, or the process of stitching several tracks together that's come to be known as bootlegging or smushing.

In thinking about the way that UbuWeb (and many other types of file sharing systems) distribute their warez, I've come up with a term: nude media. What I mean by this is that once, say, an MP3 file is downloaded from the context of a site such as UbuWeb, it's free or naked, stripped bare of the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork itself. Completely detached from shopping impulses, unadorned with neither branding nor scholarly liner notes, emanating from no authoritative source, the consumer of these objects is left with only the wine, not the bottles. Thrown into open peer-to-peer distribution systems, nude media files often lose even their historical significance and molt into free-floating sound works, travelling in circles that they would not normally reach if clad in their conventional clothing.

All forms of traditional media that are morphed onto the web are in some way defrocked. Let's look at a few text-based examples. This article about Tony Curtis, which appeared in last Sunday's Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, is fully clothed in the authoritative conventions of The New York Times. Everything from the typeface to the pull quote to the photo layout bespeaks the authority of the paper of record. There's something comforting about reading the Arts & Leisure section every Sunday and the entire visual impression of the paper reinforces that feeling. You know it's never going to change. The New York Times represents stability in every way.

Now, if we look at that same article on the New York Times website, we'll find that so much of what gave the piece its rock steadiness in the traditional print version is gone on the web. For starters, there's a big red sans-serif "W" for Washington instead of the classic black serifed "T" for Tony. Right off the bat, we are given the message that the place in which the interview happened has greater significance than the subject of the article. Other things have changed as well, most notably the size and character of the typeface. The default typeface on any browser is Times Roman but if we look at the newspaper compared to the screen, we'll see that Times Roman is never New York Times Roman. Add to this the fact that browsers and operating systems display fonts in different proportions, there is really no standard for Times Roman on the screen.

The image, too, of Mr. Curtis is different. It's shoved over to the side and shrunken. The Starbucks ad -- which appears nowhere in the print edition -- above it almost functions as a caption. We could go on and on but I think the point is obvious. The web version of the article might be termed scantily clad. While not entirely nude, the stability and authority of The New York Times brand is under siege.

In the upper right hand corner of the web page is an option to email the article. When we do that, what arrives in our inbox is extremely stripped down compared to the web page. It's just a text and the only indication that it comes from The New York Times is one line at the top that says "This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by…". The Times font has vanished, to be replaced -- at least in my inbox -- by Microsoft's proprietary sans-serif screen font Verdana. There are no images, no pull quotes, and no typographical treatments, save the capitalization of the words "WASHINGTON" AND "TONY CURTIS'S". How easy it would be to strip out the words NYTimes.com. If we do that, this file becomes detached from any authority and completely naked. In fact, it is entirely indistinguishable from any number of text-based attachments that arrive in my inbox daily.

To take it just one step further, if we cut and paste the text -- and it is a text and no longer an "article" -- into Microsoft Word and run a primitive altering function on it, for example the autosummarize feature, we end up with something baring almost no resemblance to the original article as printed in the paper or on the web. Now the lead line is "SUMMARY OF ARTICLE", followed by it's provenance and then the headline. Curiously, the word "Washington", which figured so prominently is prior versions, is nowhere to be found. The body text, too, now becomes radically unhinged and stripped down.

If I were to take this text and either email it to a number of people or enter it into an online text-mangling machine, the nude media game could continue ad-infinitum. Think of it as an ever-evolving game of telephone. Free-floating media files around the net are subject to continuous morphing and manipulation as they become farther removed from their source.

When destabilized texts are recontextualized and reclothed back into their authoritative structures, the results can be jarring. Examples of this include the Pornolizer (pornolize.com) machine, which turns every web pages into a smutty, potty-mouthed documents, while retaining their authoritative clothing; or Brian Stefans' recent series of detournments of New York Times articles, which intersperse leftist quotes with Times reportage, while still sporting the architecture of The New York Times site.

On UbuWeb, although we encode our MP3s with the ID3 tags -- which, on the MP3 player, identify the artist, the title of the cut, etc. -- we never encode provenance information, for example, "Courtesy of UbuWeb" so that when the MP3 leaves our site it is, in essence, returned to the common space of the web. In this way, once a file is downloaded from UbuWeb, the file leaves nude.

We can only guess what happens to our files after they leave our site, but I'd like to briefly to consider the journey of an MP3 that can be found on UbuWeb -- Henri Chopin's sound poem "Rouge" -- and see how over the course of the last half century, it's been subjected to various mutations, both clothed and unclothed.

Chopin began his tape recorder experiments in the mid-50s and "Rouge", recorded in 1956, was one of his first pieces. It's a literal sound painting, with the names of colors repeated with different emphasis, almost like varying brushstrokes. Manipulated audio techniques and track layering build up an increasingly dense surface. The piece reflects its time; think of it as an abstract expressionist canvas. It, too, is Greenbergian: its form is its content.

In its day, "Rouge" never made it to LP as an "official" release by a record label. It was born naked and remained that way, unreleased and without any publishing context until 24 years later when it was put out by a German gallery. But thanks to his highly visible energies as a promoter and publisher of sound poetry, tapes of Chopin's work were making the rounds of advanced musical circles of the day.

A decade after "Rouge's" recording, it curiously appears in the first "Region" of Karlehinz Stockhausen's 1966 composition Hymnen, an electronic and musique concrete melange of national anthems. Although truncated, "Rouge" forms the basis for a short spoken word section based around the varieties of the color "red." Chopin alternates with German-inflected voices reading a portion of a list of Windsor Newton paints. To listen to this excerpt alone and decontextualized, it sounds like an extension of Chopin's sound painting. But squeezed between magnetic tape deconstructions of "The Internationale" and "The Marseillaise", its meaning becomes very different. The nude poem now becomes clothed in the garments of leftist politics.

Twenty-one years later, in 1997, the sampling group called Stockhausen and Walkman (note the group's name), brought "Rouge" into yet an entirely different context: that of ironic pop in a cut called "Flogging." (flogging = flayed "rouge" skin). Amidst the cheesy vocals, snappy drumbeats and appropriated mathematical recitations from children's records, Chopin's piece is snatched away from Stockhausen's political agenda and returned closer to its formalist origins. But it's an emptying gesture: finally "Rouge" is just one sample of many, a part of the noisy landscape, whereby sounds are easily obtained and just as easily manipulated; and where none appear to have more meaning than any other.

Stockhausen and Walkman are known for their graphical sense. They obviously understand how to create a package that visually approximates their musical practice. Packaging -- or in our terms, dressing -- creates a context of value. Stockhausen and Walkman's redressing of "Rouge" places Chopin's poem back into circulation fully clothed.

In the clothed realm, popular culture's fetishization of the historical avant-garde reached a plateau a few years ago when the enormously successful rock band Sonic Youth released a CD called Goodbye 20^th Century. On it, the one-time rockers rattled their way through cover versions of some of the more difficult works by John Cage and George Maciunas, among others. Through a curious confluence of Downtown sensibility and mass marketing, thousands of rock-loving Lollapalooza-attending Sonic Youth fans bought the disc and were exposed to what until very recently, has resided on the fringes of the historical avant-garde.

Though these sorts of gestures, the avant-garde has become hip and well-marketed. A stroll through any good record store and you'll notice hundreds of artifacts of the historical avant-garde that have been gorgeously repackaged and snapped up by consumers in record, book, and museum gift shops around town.

But as soon as these items are purchased, they are often returned back, as nude media, to the of the net as offerings on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. In the case of much of this material, what was often created as an anti-authoritarian gesture has, thanks to the Internet, been restored to it's original radical intentions. Due to the manipulative properties of digital media, such artworks are susceptible to remixing and mangling on a mass scale, hence never having the one authoritative version that has been bestowed upon these objects in traditional media. They are ever-changing works-in-progress operating in the most widespread gift economy mankind has ever known.

Such circumstances raise many more questions than can be answered here: How do these various contexts influence the cultural reception of such objects? Who or what determines an avant artifact's value, both commercially and intellectually? How does this in turn impact on the artist's reputation, both commercially and intellectually? If artifacts are always in flux, when is an historical work determined to be "finished"?

And how do all these factors, in turn, position a resource like UbuWeb? It's easier to answer. Suddenly, the idea of "radical distribution" is notched up: UbuWeb is not the resource but instead, we're just another source; our "radical distribution" might not be so radical after all. It's become subsumed in the mechanics of redistribution.

It's apparent that our function has changed. Our authority has become undermined by our own process. UbuWeb is now positioned on a two-way street. Imagine these altered files returning back to the source from which they came, clothed and housed momentarily before being sent back out into the world again. Like the files themselves, UbuWeb is becoming less stabilized in its identity as a center. Instead, we're just another brief stopover point on the road to instability and nudity.