Conceived as an independent, decentralised, non-profit repository of avant-garde art, sound, poetry, film, and marginal cultural production, it embodies what may be termed utopian internet archaeology: the recovery and redistribution of materials that institutional systems often neglect, overprotect, or render inaccessible.

Its force lies in a deliberate refusal of scarcity, prestige, and proprietary containment. Goldsmith’s practice, shaped by poetry, editing, radio, and “uncreative writing”, transforms archiving from passive custody into an active aesthetic and political method. The Museo Reina Sofía interview foregrounds this ethos through the provocation “We are all archivists!!”, suggesting that contemporary cultural memory is no longer the exclusive domain of libraries, universities, or museums, but a distributed responsibility enacted through copying, cataloguing, uploading, listening, and recontextualising. A revealing case study is UbuWeb’s relationship with WFMU and the 365 Days Project, where home recordings, eccentric sound documents, and musical curiosities migrate from private collections and community radio into a durable online archive. In this movement, the peripheral becomes canonical without surrendering its strangeness. UbuWeb’s significance therefore resides not simply in its scale, but in its challenge to the regimes that decide what deserves preservation. It demonstrates that the archive, when liberated from institutional obedience, can become a radical technology of access, memory, and cultural disobedience. Museo Reina Sofía (2022) Kenneth Goldsmith: We are all archivists!! Available at: Museo Reina Sofía (Accessed: 29 April 2026).