SHADOW LIBRARIES : UBUWEB IN ATHENS | Top Tens
Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, 2018
 
Shadow Libraries was a three-day festival at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens curated by Ilan Manouach & Kenneth Goldsmith. The program consisted of an exhibition, an educational program of four workshops and two symposia. In an age where public libraries are an endangered institution, UbuWeb and other collections run by amateur librarians emerge as new, vital topographies of sharing. This symposium and the related workshops explored the conceptual consistency and the ethics of digital preservation and distribution from the practitioners’ perspective. The invited guests unpacked the thingness of these fragile knowledge infrastructures and discussed how their architecture challenges current norms of intellectual property rights, market concentration and control of access.

A standard feature of UbuWeb is its "Top Tens", where invited guests get to recommend their cherry-picking selection of the archive. "UbuWeb in Athens" invites ten contributors living in Greece to share and spatialise their collection by tracing their own path through the colossal mass of UbuWeb’s available works.

My selection is centered around Jon Rafman’s “Kool-Aid Man in Second Life”, in which Kool-Aid – a jug overfilled with the eponymous drink and icecubes – serves as Jon Rafman’s avatar inside Second Life’s virtual world. Floating in a constantly fluid mixture of animal, human and fantasy creatures, users, avatars and inhabitants, virtual fantasies and real, an unappealing sort of beauty shines through what could be called a cyber surrealism of the commons – the piece is almost an elegy to the liberational potential of the internet – a space where fantasies become true. It is as well the place of exuberant emotion – through pastoral sublime scenes in now far outdated CGI, in trance parties and open mic nights or sex marathons, the piece feeds on emotions – and Kool-Aid, gloriously optimistic, is always ready to pick up and continue, even after he gets unexpectedly humped by a dragon during a dungeon visit, always on the verge between voyeur and participant. 

I emulated Kool-Aid’s flânerie modus into UbuWeb, lingering where I saw fit and gleaning parts- Fassbinder's soundtracks reflecting his elaborations on melodrama, meant to be played alongside Valentine de St Point’s controversial – to say the least – Futurist Manifesto of Lust, two out of seven of Tony Smith’s cardboard parts of a model for his “Maze Sculpture,” published in Aspen magazine in 1967, which provided also the DIY kit for a kite designed by Nori Sinoto 4 years later, containing a passage on desire from Chou Tun-I. To end it all, an essay from T. Adorno, anthropomorphizing punctuation marks, and a poster from the Outsiders selection, containing the cryptic message “No free assssscat tonight,” summing up ideas of commons and desire.

1. Jon Rafman – Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008-11)
2. Rainer Werner Fassbinder – I Kill Them (from Whity) (1970)
3. Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Main Title (from I Only Want You To Love Me) (1970)
4. Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Faux Pas Waltz and Song (from Chinese Roulette) (1970)
5. Valentine de St Point – Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913) iPad
6. Toni Smith – Maze model pt. 8 (1967)
7. Toni Smith – Maze model pt. 4 (1967)
8. Nori Sinoto, Chou Tun-i – Treatise on Understanding Kite (1971)
9. Theodor Adorno – Punctuation Marks (1956)
10. Outsider Posters – Asssscat