The Surplus of Copying
How Shadow Libraries and Pirate Archives Contribute to the
Creation of Cultural Memory and the Commons
By Cornelia Sollfrank
Digital artworks tend to have a problematic relationship with the white cube—in particular, when they are intended and optimized for online distribution. While curators and exhibition-makers usually try to avoid showing such works altogether, or at least aim at enhancing their sculptural qualities to make them more presentable, the exhibition Top Tens featured an abundance of web quality digital artworks, thus placing emphasis on the very media condition of such digital artifacts. The exhibition took place at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens in March 2018 and was part of the larger festival Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens,1 an event to introduce the online archive UbuWeb2 to the Greek audience and discuss related cultural, ethical, technical, and legal issues. This text takes the event—and the exhibition in particular—as a starting point for a closer look at UbuWeb and the role an artistic approach can play in building cultural memory within the neoliberal knowledge economy.
UbuWeb—The Cultural Memory of the Avant-Garde
Since Kenneth Goldsmith started Ubu in 1997 the site has become a major point of reference for anyone interested in exploring twentieth-century avant-garde art. The online archive provides free and unrestricted access to a remarkable collection of thousands of artworks—among them almost 700 films and videos, over 1000 sound art pieces, dozens of filmed dance productions, an overwhelming amount of visual poetry and conceptual writing, critical documents, but also musical scores, patents, electronic music resources, plus an edition of vital new literature, the /ubu editions. Ubu contextualizes the archived objects within curated sections and also provides framing academic essays. Although it is a project run by Goldsmith without a budget, it has built a reputation for making all the things available one would not find elsewhere. The focus on “avant-garde” may seem a bit pretentious at first, but when you look closer at the project, its operator and the philosophy behind it, it becomes obvious how much sense this designation makes. Understanding the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde as “a history of subversive takes on creativity, originality, and authorship,”3 such spirit is not only reflected in terms of the archive’s contents but also in terms of the project as a whole. Theoretical statements by Goldsmith in which he questions concepts such as authorship, originality, and creativity support this thesis4—and with that a conflictual relationship with the notion of intellectual property is preprogrammed. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the increasing popularity of the project goes hand-in-hand with a growing discussion about its ethical justification.
At the heart of Ubu, there is the copy! Every item in the archive is a digital copy, either of another digital item or, in fact, it is the digitized version of an analog object.5 That is to say, the creation of a digital collection is inevitably based on copying the desired archive records and storing them on dedicated media. However, making a copy is in itself a copyright-relevant act, if the respective item is an original creation and as such protected under copyright law.6 Hence, “any reproduction of a copyrighted work infringes the copyright of the author or the corresponding rights of use of the copyright holder”.7 Whether the existence of an artwork within the Ubu collection is a case of copyright infringement varies with each individual case and depends on the legal status of the respective work, but also on the way the rights holders decide to act. As with all civil law, there is no judge without a plaintiff, which means even if there is no express consent by the rights holders, the work can remain in the archive as long as there is no request for removal.8 Its status, however, is precarious. We find ourselves in the notorious gray zone of copyright law where nothing is clear and many things are possible—until somebody decides to challenge this status. Exploring the borders of this experimental playground involves risk-taking, but, at the same time, it is the only way to preserve existing freedoms and make a case for changing cultural needs, which have not been considered in current legal settings. And as the 20 years of Ubu’s existence demonstrate, the practice may be experimental and precarious, but with growing cultural relevance and reputation it is also gaining in stability.
Fair Use and Public Interest
At all public appearances and public presentations Goldsmith and his supporters emphasize the educational character of the project and its non-commercial orientation.9 Such a characterization is clearly intended to take the wind out of the sails of its critics from the start and to shift the attention away from the notion of piracy and toward questions of public interest and the common good.
From a cultural point of view, the project unquestionably is of inestimable value; a legal defense, however, would be a difficult undertaking. Copyright law, in fact, has a built-in opening, the so-called copyright exceptions or fair use regulations. They vary according to national law and cultural traditions and allow for the use of copyrighted works under certain, defined provisions without permission of the owner. The exceptions basically apply to the areas of research and private study (both non-commercial), education, review, and criticism and are described through general guidelines. “These defences exist in order to restore the balance between the rights of the owner of copyright and the rights of society at large.”10
A very powerful provision in most legislations is the permission to make “private copies”, digital and analog ones, in small numbers, but they are limited to non-commercial and non-public use, and passing on to a third party is also excluded.11 As Ubu is an online archive that makes all of its records publicly accessible and, not least, also provides templates for further copying, it exceeds the notion of a “private copy” by far. Regarding further fair use provisions, the four factors that are considered in a decision-making process in US copyright provisions, for instance, refer to: 1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; 2) the nature of the copyrighted work; 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for the value of the copyrighted work (US Copyright Act, 1976, 17 USC. §107, online, n.pag.). Applying these fair use provisions to Ubu, one might consider that the main purposes of the archive relate to education and research, that it is by its very nature non-commercial, and it largely does not collide with any third party business interests as most of the material is not commercially available. However, proving this in detail would be quite an endeavor. And what complicates matters even more is that the archival material largely consists of original works of art, which are subject to strict copyright law protection, that all the works have been copied without any transformative or commenting intention, and last but not least, that the aspect of the appropriateness of the amount of used material becomes absurd with reference to an archive whose quality largely depends on comprehensiveness: the more the merrier. As Simon Stokes points out, legally binding decisions can only be made on a case-by-case basis, which is why it is difficult to make a general evaluation of Ubu’s legal situation.12 The ethical defense tends to induce the cultural value of the archive as a whole and its invaluable contribution to cultural memory, while the legal situation does not consider the value of the project as a whole and necessitates breaking it down into all the individual items within the collection.
This very brief, when not abridged discussion of the possibilities of fair use already demonstrates how complex it would be to apply them to Ubu. How pointless it would be to attempt a serious legal discussion for such a privately run archive becomes even clearer when looking at the problems public libraries and archives have to face. While in theory such official institutions may even have a public mission to collect, preserve, and archive digital material, in practice, copyright law largely prevents the execution of this task, as Steinhauer explains.13 The legal expert introduces the example of the German National Library, which was assigned the task since 2006 to make back-up copies of all websites published within the .de sublevel domain, but it turned out to be illegal.14 Identifying a deficiently legal situation when it comes to collecting, archiving, and providing access to digital cultural goods, Steinhauer even speaks of a “legal obligation to amnesia”.15 And it is particularly striking that, from a legal perspective, the collecting of digitalia is more strictly regulated than the collecting of books, for example, where the property status of the material object comes into play. Given the imbalance between cultural requirements, copyright law, and the technical possibilities, it is not surprising that private initiatives are being founded with the aim to collect and preserve cultural memory. These initiatives make use of the affordability and availability of digital technology and its infrastructures, and they take responsibility for the preservation of cultural goods by simply ignoring copyright induced restrictions, i.e. opposing the insatiable hunger of the IP regime for control.
Shadow Libraries
Ubu was presented and discussed in Athens at an event titled Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens, thereby making clear reference to the ecosystem of shadow libraries. A library, in general, is an institution that collects, orders, and makes published information available while taking into account archival, economic, and synoptic aspects. A shadow library does exactly the same thing, but its mission is not an official one. Usually, the infrastructure of shadow libraries is conceived, built, and run by a private initiative, an individual, or a small group of people, who often prefer to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. In terms of the media content provided, most shadow libraries are peer-produced in the sense that they are based on the contributions of a community of supporters, sometimes referred to as “amateur librarians”. The two key attributes of any proper library, according to Amsterdam-based media scholar Bodó Balázs, are the catalog and the community: “The catalogue does not just organize the knowledge stored in the collection; it is not just a tool of searching and browsing. It is a critical component in the organisation of the community of librarians who preserve and nourish the collection.”16 What is specific about shadow libraries, however, is the fact that they make available anything their contributors consider to be relevant—regardless of its legal status. That is to say, shadow libraries also provide unauthorized access to copyrighted publications, and they make the material available for download without charge and without any other restrictions. And because there is a whole network of shadow libraries whose mission is “to remove all barriers in the way of science,”17 experts speak of an ecosystem fostering free and universal access to knowledge.
The notion of the shadow library enjoyed popularity in the early 2000s when the wide availability of digital networked media contributed to the emergence of large-scale repositories of scientific materials, the most famous one having been Gigapedia, which later transformed into library.nu. This project was famous for hosting approximately 400,000 (scientific) books and journal articles but had to be shut down in 2012 as a consequence of a series of injunctions from powerful publishing houses. The now leading shadow library in the field, Library Genesis (LibGen), can be considered as its even more influential successor. As of November 2016 the database contained 25 million documents (42 terabytes), of which 2.1 million were books, with digital copies of scientific articles published in 27,134 journals by 1342 publishers.18 The large majority of the digital material is of scientific and educational nature (95%), while only 5% serves recreational purposes.19 The repository is based on various ways of crowd-sourcing, i.e. social and technical forms of accessing and sharing academic publications. Despite a number of legal cases and court orders, the site is still available under various and changing domain names.20
The related project Sci-Hub is an online service that processes requests for pay-walled articles by providing systematic, automized, but unauthorized backdoor access to proprietary scholarly journal databases. Users requesting papers not present in LibGen are advised to download them through Sci-Hub; the respective PDF files are served to users and automatically added to LibGen (if not already present). According to Nature magazine, Sci-Hub hosts around 60 million academic papers and was able to serve 75 million downloads in 2016. On a daily basis 70,000 users access approximately 200,000 articles.
The founder of the meta library Sci-Hub is Kazakh programmer Alexandra Elbakyan, who has been sued by large publishing houses and was convicted twice to pay almost 20 million US$ in compensation for the losses her activities allegedly have caused, which is why she had to go underground in Russia. For illegally leaking millions of documents the New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden in 2016: “While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, ranging from acoustics to zymology.”21 In the same year the prestigious Nature magazine elected her as one of the ten most influential people in science.22 Unlike other persecuted people, she went on the offensive and started to explain her actions and motives in court documents and blog posts. Sci-Hub encourages new ways of distributing knowledge, beyond any commercial interests. It provides a radically open infrastructure thus creating an inviting atmosphere. “It is a knowledge infrastructure that can be freely accessed, used and built upon by anyone.”23
As both projects LibGen and Sci-Hub are based in post-Soviet countries, Balázs reconstructed the history and spirit of Russian reading culture and brings them into connection.24 Interestingly, the author also establishes a connection to the Kolhoz (Russian: колхо́з), an early Soviet collective farm model that was self-governing, community-owned, and a collaborative enterprise, which he considers to be a major inspiration for the digital librarians. He also identifies parallels between this Kolhoz model and the notion of the “commons”—a concept that will be discussed in more detail with regards to shadow libraries further below.
According to Balázs, these sorts of libraries and collections are part of the Guerilla Open Access movement (GOA) and thus practical manifestations of Aaron Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”.25 In this manifesto the American hacker and activist pointed out the flaws of open access politics and aimed at recruiting supporters for the idea of “radical” open access. Radical in this context means to completely ignore copyright and simply make as much information available as possible. “Information is power” is how the manifesto begins. Basically, it addresses the—what he calls—“privileged”, in the sense that they do have access to information as academic staff or librarians, and he calls on their support for building a system of freely available information by using their privilege, downloading and making information available. Swartz and Elbakyan both have become the “iconic leaders”26 of a global movement that fights for scientific knowledge to be(come) freely accessible and whose protagonists usually prefer to operate unrecognized. While their particular projects may be of a more or less temporary nature, the discursive value of the work of the “amateur librarians” and their projects will have a lasting impact on the development of access politics.
Cultural and Knowledge Commons
The above discussion illustrates that the phenomenon of shadow libraries cannot be reduced to its copyright infringing aspects. It needs to be contextualized within a larger sociopolitical debate that situates the demand for free and unrestricted access to knowledge within the struggle against the all-co-opting logic of capital, which currently aims to economize all aspects of life.
In his analysis of the Russian shadow libraries Balázs has drawn a parallel to the commons as an alternative mode of ownership and a collective way of dealing with resources. The growing interest in the discourses around the commons demonstrates the urgency and timeliness of this concept. The structural definition of the commons conceived by political economist Massimo de Angelis allows for its application in diverse fields: “Commons are social systems in which resources are pooled by a community of people who also govern these resources to guarantee the latter’s sustainability (if they are natural resources) and the reproduction of the community. These people engage in ‘commoning,’ that is a form of social labour that bears a direct relation to the needs of the people, or the commoners”.27 While the model originates in historical ways of sharing natural resources, it has gained new momentum in relation to very different resources, thus constituting a third paradigm of production—beyond state and private—however, with all commoning activities today still being embedded in the surrounding economic system.
As a reason for the newly aroused interest in the commons, de Angelis provides the crisis of global capital, which has maneuvered itself into a systemic impasse. While constantly expanding through its inherent logic of growth and accumulation, it is the very same logic that destroys the two systems capital relies on: non-market-shaped social reproduction and the ecological system. Within this scenario de Angelis describes capital as being in need of the commons as a “fix” for the most urgent systemic failures: “It needs a ‘commons fix,’ especially in order to deal with the devastation of the social fabric as a result of the current crisis of reproduction. Since neoliberalism is not about to give up its management of the world, it will most likely have to ask the commons to help manage the devastation it creates. And this means: if the commons are not there, capital will have to promote them somehow.”28
This rather surprising entanglement of capital and the commons, however, is not the only perspective. Commons, at the same time, have the potential to create “a social basis for alternative ways of articulating social production, independent from capital and its prerogatives. Indeed, today it is difficult to conceive emancipation from capital—and achieving new solutions to the demands of buen vivir, social and ecological justice—without at the same time organizing on the terrain of commons, the non-commodified systems of social production. Commons are not just a ‘third way’ beyond state and market failures; they are a vehicle for emerging communities of struggle to claim ownership to their own conditions of life and reproduction.”29 It is their purpose to satisfy people’s basic needs and empower them by providing access to alternative means of subsistence. In that sense, commons can be understood as an experimental zone in which participants can learn to negotiate responsibilities, social relations, and peer-based means of production.
Art and Commons
Projects such as UbuWeb, Monoskop,30 aaaaarg,31 Memory of the World,32 and 0xdb33 vary in size, they have different forms of organization and foci, but they all care for specific cultural goods and make sure these goods remain widely accessible—be it digital copies of artworks and original documents, books and other text formats, videos, film, or sound and music. Unlike the large shadow libraries introduced above, which aim to provide access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mainly academic papers and books, thus trying to fully cover the world of scholarly and academic works, the smaller artist-run projects are of different nature. While UbuWeb’s founder, for instance, also promotes a generally unrestricted access to cultural goods, his approach with UbuWeb is to build a curated archive with copies of artworks that he considers to be relevant for his very context.34 The selection is based on personal assessment and preference and cared for affectionately. Despite its comprehensiveness, it still can be considered a “personal website” on which the artist shares things relevant to him. As such, he is in good company with similar “artist-run shadow libraries”, which all provide a technical infrastructure with which they share resources, while the resources are of specific relevance to their providers.
Just like the large pirate libraries, these artistic archiving and library practices challenge the notion of culture as private property and remind us that it is not an unquestionable absolute. As Jonathan Lethem contends, “[culture] rather is a social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.”35 Shadow libraries, in general, are symptomatic of the cultural battles and absurdities around access and copyright within an economic logic that artificially tries to limit the abundance of digital culture, in which sharing does not mean dividing but rather multiplying. They have become a cultural force, one that can be represented in Foucauldian terms, as symptomatic of broader power struggles as well as systemic failures inherent in the cultural formation. As Marczewska puts it, “Goldsmith moves away from thinking about models of cultural production in proprietary terms and toward paradigms of creativity based on a culture of collecting, organizing, curating, and sharing content.”36 And by doing so, he produces major contradictions, or rather he allows the already existing contradictions to come to light. The artistic archives and libraries are precarious in terms of their legal status, while it is exactly due to their disregard of copyright that cultural resources could be built that exceed the relevance of most official archives that are bound to abide the law. In fact, there are no comparable official resources, which is why the function of these projects is at least twofold: education and preservation.37
Maybe UbuWeb and the other, smaller or larger, shadow libraries do not qualify as commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among themselves. This would require collective, formalized, and transparent types of organization. Furthermore, most of the digital items they circulate are privately owned and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons resources. These projects, in many respects, are in a preliminary stage by pointing to the ideal of culture as a commons. By providing access to cultural goods and knowledge that would otherwise not be available at all or inaccessible for large parts of the general public, they might even fulfill the function of a “commons fix”, to a certain degree, but at the same time they are the experimental zone needed to unlearn copyright and relearn new ways of cultural production and dissemination beyond the property regime. In any case, they can function as perfect entry points for the discussion and investigation of the transformative force art can have within the current global neoliberal knowledge society.
Top Tens—Showcasing the Copy as an Aesthetic and Political Statement
The exhibition Top Tens provided an experimental setting to explore the possibilities of translating the abundance of a digital archive into a “real space”, by presenting one hundred artworks from the Ubu archive.38 Although all works were properly attributed in the exhibition, the artists whose works were shown neither had a say about their participation in the exhibition nor about the display formats. Tolerating the presence of a work in the archive is one thing; tolerating its display in such circumstances is something else, which might even touch upon moral rights and the integrity of the work. However, the exhibition was not so much about the individual works on display but the archiving condition they are subject to. So the discussion here has nothing to do the abiding art theory question of original and copy. Marginally, it is about the question of high-quality versus low-quality copies. In reproducible media the value of an artwork cannot be based on its originality any longer—the core criterion for sales and market value. This is why many artists use the trick of high-resolution and limited edition, a kind of distributed originality status for several authorized objects, which all are not 100 percent original but still a bit more original than an arbitrary unlimited edition. Leaving this whole discussion aside was a clear indication that something else was at stake. The conceptual statement made by the exhibition and its makers foregrounded the nature of the shadow library, which visitors were able to experience when entering the gallery space. Instead of viewing the artworks in the usual way—online—they had the opportunity to physically immerse themselves in the cultural condition of proliferated acts of copying, something that “affords their reconceptualization as a hybrid creative-critical tool and an influential aesthetic category.”39
Appropriation and copying as longstanding methods of subversive artistic production, where the reuse of existing material serves as a tool for commentary, social critique, and a means of making a political statement, has expanded here to the art of exhibition-making. The individual works serve to illustrate a curatorial concept, thus radically shifting the avant-garde gesture which copying used to be in the twentieth century, to breathe new life in the “culture of collecting, organizing, curating, and sharing content.” Organizing this conceptually concise exhibition was a brave and bold statement by the art institution: The Onassis Cultural Centre, one of Athens’ most prestigious cultural institutions, dared to adopt a resolutely political stance for a—at least in juridical terms—questionable project, as Ubu lives from the persistent denial of copyright. Neglecting the concerns of the individual authors and artists for a moment was a necessary precondition in order to make space for rethinking the future of cultural production.
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Special thanks to Eric Steinhauer and all the artists and amateur librarians who are taking care of our cultural memory.
1 Festival program online: Onassis Cultural Centre, “Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens,” http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2018/ (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
2 UbuWeb is a massive online archive of avant-garde art created over the last two decades by New York-based artist and writer Kenneth Goldsmith. Website of the archive: http://ubu.com (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
3 Kaja Marczewska, This Is Not a Copy. Writing at the Iterative Turn (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 22.
4 For further reading: Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
5 Many works in the archive stem from the pre-digital era, and there is no precise knowledge of the sources where Ubu obtains its material, but it is known that Goldsmith also digitizes a lot of material himself.
6 In German copyright law, for example, §17 and §19a grant the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and make available online to the author. See also: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__15.html (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
7 Eric Steinhauer, “Rechtspflicht zur Amnesie: Digitale Inhalte, Archive und Urheberrecht,” iRightsInfo (2013), https://irights.info/artikel/rechtspflicht-zur-amnesie-digitale-inhalte-archive-und-urheberrecht/18101 (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
8 In particularly severe cases of copyright infringement also state prosecutors can become active, which in practice, however, remains the exception. The circumstances in which criminal law must be applied are described in §109 of German copyright law.
9 See, for example, “Shadow Libraries” for a video interview with Kenneth Goldsmith.
10 Paul Torremans, Intellectual Property Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 265.
11 See also §53 para. 1–3 of the German Act on Copyright and Related Rights (UrhG), §42 para. 4 in the Austrian UrhG, and Article 19 of Swiss Copyright Law.
12 Simon Stokes, Art & Copyright (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003).
13 Steinhauer, “Rechtspflicht zur Amnesie”.
14 This discrepancy between a state mandate for cultural preservation and copyright law has only been fixed in 2018 with the introduction of a special law, §16a DNBG.
15 Steinhauer, “Rechtspflicht zur Amnesie”.
16 Bodó Balázs, “The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library,” Nov. 4, 2014, SSRN, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2616631, (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
17 Motto of Sci-Hub: “Sci-Hub,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
18 Guillaume Cabanac, “Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67, 4 (2016): 874–884.
19 Ibid.
20 The current address is http://libgen.io/# (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
21 Kate Murphy, “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” New York Times Sunday Review, Mar. 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/should-all-research-papers-be-free.html (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
22 Richard Van Noorden, “Nature’s 10,” Nature, Dec. 19, 2016, https://www.nature.com/news/nature-s-10-1.21157 (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
23 Bodó Balázs, “Pirates in the library – an inquiry into the guerilla open access movement,” paper for the 8th Annual Workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property, CREATe, University of Glasgow, UK, July 6–8, 2016. Online available at: https://adrien-chopin.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/7/6/21765614/2016_bodo_-_pirates.pdf (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
24 Balázs, “The Genesis of Library Genesis”.
25 Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” Internet Archive, July 2008, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
26 Balászs, “Pirates in the library”.
27 Massimo De Angelis, “Economy, Capital and the Commons,” in: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 201.
28 Ibid., 211.
29 Ibid.
30 See: https://monoskop.org (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
31 Accessible with invitation. See: https://aaaaarg.fail/ (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
32 See: https://www.memoryoftheworld.org (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
33 See: https://0xdb.org (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
34 Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Cornelia Sollfrank, The Poetry of Archiving, 2013, https://vimeo.com/60377169 (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
35 Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. (London: Vintage, 2012), 101.
36 Marczewska, This Is Not a Copy, 2.
37 The research project Creating Commons, based at Zurich University of the Arts, is dedicated to the potential of art projects for the creation of commons: “creating commons,” http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
38 One of Ubu’s features online has been the “top ten”, the idea to invite guests to pick their ten favorite works from the archive and thus introduce a mix between chance operation and subjectivity in order to reveal hidden treasures. The curators of the festival in Athens, Ilan Manouach and Kenneth Goldsmith, decided to elevate this principle to the curatorial concept of the exhibition and invited ten guests to select their ten favorite works. The Athens-based curator Elpida Karaba was commissioned to work on an adequate concept for the realization, which turned out to be a huge black box divided into ten small cubicles with monitors and seating areas, supplemented by a large wall projection illuminating the whole space.
39 Marczewska, This Is Not a Copy, 7.
This text is under a Creative Commons license: CC BY NC SA 3.0 Austria