Welcome to Culture Buzz, Kenneth Goldsmith, welcome to Israel. Thank you, Aaron, it's great to be here. The reason you're here is mainly a website named Ubuweb. Tell us about it. Well, it is the largest website for the avant-garde on the Internet. It's been going for 18 years and it's free culture for everybody. It's accessible all over the world and the largest distribution for archives relating to the avant-garde. Is it only in English or may our viewers, Palestinians or Israelis, can watch some of the stuff in their languages? There are. They're both Palestinian and a lot of Arab content and some Israeli content. We could use more. Would you like to help curate a section of Israeli films and avant-garde sounds that should be on Ubuweb that aren't? I'd love to, but you know the history of avant-garde is sort of Anglo-centric or mostly in English. And what do you think the history of avant-garde got from other cultures? Well, I actually think that's a fallacy and I'd like to make that fallacy clearer on Ubuweb. Yes, Ubuweb is primarily dead, white, western men. Primarily, that is the primary history of our guard. But as we're going along, we're uncovering a lot of other avant-garde that existed that were less known. For example, we work with Bedouin magazine who has brought a tremendous amount of content from the Arab world of avant-garde content to Ubuweb. We're working with Mexico to bring more Mexican culture, China to bring more Chinese avant-garde. So yeah, it's there. It's got to be dug up though and it takes a little effort. And in Ubuweb, well, apart from that, Ubuweb is all about archiving, but you're also a well-known poet. And you do some similar stuff to Ubuweb in your writing. Yeah, well, we're just, we're the moment where it's all about the archive. And our writing is archival. We're drawing from many sources. We're collating, we're collecting, we're counting, we're quantifying in our writing. And I think that's reflected on the work that we do everywhere, whether it's our academic work, whether it's our artistic production, or whether it's our community service like Ubuweb is. But what I'm referring to is the effect of the digital age on both culture and avant-garde and your writing, of course. Well, none of this would have happened without the digital age. Before the digital age archives were private places where you had to go to in order to access their treasures today, we're fighting for free information being available on the web. There's still a lot locked up in academic science and behind paywalls, but we're fighting that and hoping to get everything free. So what is your opinion on the clouds referring to places that are not behind paywalls? Well, the clouds are owned by corporations. Clouds are not municipalities or clouds are not a good, good community service people. They're there for profit and they're subject to battles between corporations, battles between countries, battles between copyright laws, battles of Hollywood. And so I don't really trust the cloud. I mean, I like the idea of it, but it's shown us to be something other than what it is. So how do you apply an alternative in Ubuweb to that? Well, I make everything on a Ubuweb downloadable. We can't assume that we have web connections wherever we go, as a matter of fact, most places that we go around the world, there are no web connections. And they're only locked up or we have to pay extravagant amounts of money for it or have access. So at those times, or you run a bus somewhere, those times it's good to have artifacts able to be downloaded and one becomes then there. So it's so great that we've got Ubuweb, but there is only one of it. Well, Ubuweb ignores copyright. Ubuweb pretends copyright doesn't exist. And with the type of materials that we deal with, it really is okay. I mean, really nobody seems to mind because they're not worth any real money. Nobody's losing any money by us distributing these things. So it's possible to enact a utopia in this way. And I'd like to ask you about your books. What's special about them? What's special about them is that I don't really write them. I take them from other places. And I republish previously existing texts or previously existing conversations and move them basically from one context to another. For instance, you've got a book named The Title Day in which you transcribe a whole issue of New York Times. Newspaper. Why did you do that? Oh, well, I was at the end of the project before that and I didn't have anything to do. And I was a Friday afternoon and the newspaper arrived. The New York Times arrived. And I looked at it and I thought, I'm going to retype this newspaper. And so a year and a half later, I was done. It was a great year and a half. It was beautiful. It was one of the best times I've ever had. And this book, as well as the other got you a lot of fans. I don't know how many of them, but they're really into it. My three fans are very excited about my work. Listen, it's not mainstream stuff. This is pretty cult, weird stuff. One never will get rich or particularly famous doing this kind of thing. But you do maintain or even progress a certain artistic tradition. Well, I think so. And it's a great tradition of the avant-garde going back to the early modernist, Malermé, as repound, and Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Charles Olson, and the objectivists. And moving all the way into the language poets, and now we have conceptual writing. So it's a good mini-age. And none of those people got really too famous. Maybe with the exception of Joyce and Stein a little bit. But everybody else is pretty obscure. So what is conceptual writing all about? Well, conceptual writing is a type of writing where it's better to think about the book than it really is to read it. You don't want to read these books. It's really fun to talk about. But if you read it, it's also fun. Well, you have to just be some kind of strange mancichist in order to enjoy such tortures. But I'm told people do. It's certainly not me. I dislike my own books. I find it to be rather awesome. But many people like your books and many students of yours like the way you teach. What do you teach? I teach on creative writing. I teach them how to steal, how to appropriate, how to plagiarize in a smart way. And people who cheat in your course, they get an ad. If you don't cheat, you don't do well. But is there a way to cheat? Cheating? Well, not really. I mean, you've got to be really smart. My students are so good at cheating because that's all they've done their whole life. But they've never been asked to be accountable for those decisions. I say, well, you know, why did you steal that? And how does it make sense within the other projects that you're doing? And so I teach them responsible plagiarism. I'd like to ask you about the effect of technology on culture. What is your opinion regarding that? The effect of technology is everywhere and it's going to be much more prevalent moving forward. But do you think that we should just flow with technology, with technological determinism or should we object to something? You can object, but it's not going to wait for you. I think it's a done deal. I mean, this is on YouTube. It's being filmed with a digital camera. We are going to object. But please stop filming. Take this off of YouTube right away. But don't you think that technology is biased and is controlled by economical, political, big corporates or companies? We don't really have much of a choice there. So we try to use open source materials. We try to distribute our work in open source materials. But of course, we know that all the machinery is run by corporations. All the machinery is made by corporations. We're not going to build it from scratch. I don't think we have much of a choice. But isn't art and especially avant-garde sort of mechanism to sting it or just fight in the smallest bit? I think it's about how you use a technology. The technology is mostly neutral. It's what you do with the technology. And what also technology allows you to do, you know, may be the agenda of the apparatus. So you can use your source materials. All right. How's that? Take this off of YouTube. Thank you very much for the interview and for coming. Well, I'm so happy to be here.