Published 10 times between 1965 and 1971, Aspen billed itself as the first three-dimensional magazine. Most issues arrived in a notebook-size box stuffed with articles that had been printed individually rather than stapled together. But it was the nature of its contents that made Aspen magazine stand out like a ski lift in a cornfield. Each issue was as likely to hold postcards, posters and phonograph records as essays. And among the magazine’s 235 contributors were many prominent figures on the 60’s cultural landscape, including Roland Barthes, John Lennon, Marshall McLuhan, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. Kenneth Goldsmith, founding editor of UbuWeb, will give a guided tour of Aspen Magazine, now housed permanently on UbuWeb. The talk will include an in-depth look at the films, recording, sculptures, writings and images that this remarkable publication produced.
- This event has passed.
Jan 16, 2008 at 7:00 pm
A tour by Kenneth Goldsmith: Aspen- the Multimedia Magazine in a Box
With Kenneth Goldsmith
Press
About UbuWeb
“…a peerless source of brilliant artistic materials… UbuWeb’s content is refreshingly unique and challenging… Though the art on offer is diverse and widely experimental, the site’s own design is wisely elegant and restrained. At last: something on the web that doesn’t echo David Frost’s definition of TV as “an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.”
– The Guardian, UK
“A truly amazing example of what the web enables in terms of closed access to media… Ubuweb has become an unprecedented archive of the Avante Garde and experimental media arts… Ubuweb is one those net destinations / applications / sites that has the prclosedsity to induce a feeling akin to vertigo. There is so much media here of historical importance, in terms of art practicethinking, that one could spend a life just moving from one incredible find to the next…”
– CCAP Research Community, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia
“In a world where corporate advertising has left its stamp on almost every aspect of human interaction… it is incredibly refreshing to find an enterprise in which the act of selling is completely forbidden, and from which no one makes or loses a penny. The additional fact that such an enterprise provides some of the world’s most hard-to-find creative material free for the taking makes UbuWeb one of the more useful, interesting archives of available today.”
-Yale Daily News
“Ubuweb is one of the great cultural resources of the 21st century.”
– Ron Silliman
“UbuWeb is well designed, with streamlined navigation that is intuitive and easy to use… This unique, unparalleled collection would be invaluable to librarians and educators in the humanities and social sciences.”
— ACRL, Association of College and Research Libraries, C&RL News, College and Research LibrariesNews
“As an example of creative publishing… just stunning.”
-The New York Times
“UbuWeb, roi du cinéma expérimental.”
– Libération, Paris
“Like all the best galleries, UbuWeb somehow creates its own distinctive space, and one perfectly suited to its brilliant collection.”
– The London Sunday Times
“Ubu tries to fulfill the Internet ideal of accessible, quality information, steadily expanding, with one concrete poem at a time… UbuWeb hints at possibilities unexplored as of yet and the potential potency of the Internet as an artistic medium.”
– The Yale Herald
About the Artist
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most “exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb ( http://ubu.com), and the editor “I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews,” which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “Kenneth Goldsmith: Sucking On Words” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, a online poetry archive. More about Goldsmith can be found on his author’s page at the University of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center.
