Using clear, readable prose, conceptual artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s manifesto shows how our time on the internet is not really wasted but is quite productive and creative as he puts the experience in its proper theoretical and philosophical context.
Kenneth Goldsmith wants you to rethink the internet. Many people feel guilty after spending hours watching cat videos or clicking link after link after link. But Goldsmith sees that “wasted” time differently. Unlike old media, the internet demands active engagement—and it’s actually making us more social, more creative, even more productive.
When Goldsmith, a renowned conceptual artist and poet, introduced a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet”, he nearly broke the internet. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Vice, Time, CNN, the Telegraph, and many more, ran articles expressing their shock, dismay, and, ultimately, their curiosity. Goldsmith’s ideas struck a nerve, because they are brilliantly subversive—and endlessly shareable.
In Wasting Time on the Internet, Goldsmith expands upon his provocative insights, contending that our digital lives are remaking human experience. When we’re “wasting time,” we’re actually creating a culture of collaboration. We’re reading and writing more—and quite differently. And we’re turning concepts of authority and authenticity upside-down. The internet puts us in a state between deep focus and subconscious flow, a state that Goldsmith argues is ideal for creativity. Where that creativity takes us will be one of the stories of the twenty-first century.
Wide-ranging, counterintuitive, engrossing, unpredictable—like the internet itself—Wasting Time on the Internet is the manifesto you didn’t know you needed.

Wasting Time on the Internet

Computers & Technology

Goldsmith, Kenneth

Computer Science

Harper-perennial

Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb

In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other "shadow libraries" and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb's commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today's gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard.\nIn Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other “shadow libraries” and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb’s commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today’s gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.

600 pages of rhyming phrases ending with the sound r, sorted by syllables and alphabetized.

No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96

Poetry

Small Pr Distribution

Poetry. Art. Music. Book and CD set. 73 Poems is the product of a collaboration between Kenneth Goldsmith and Joan La Barbara, known for her work with John Cage and Morton Feldman. Goldsmith's visual poems, elegantly reproduced in this Permanent Press book, are given an aural interpretation on the 45-minute CD that accompanies it.

73 Poems

LA Barbara, Joan

Permanent Pr

Poetry. "Kenneth Goldsmith is without doubt the leading conceptual poet of this time. His poetry, which draws from Fluxus, Dada, and conceptual art traditions, is clever and self aware. With now classics such as FIDGET, SOLILOQUY, and DAY (all available form SPD), he has made poetry out of the mundane and when reading his work one is forced to reconsider the stakes and the measurements of aesthetic practice. THE WEATHER, a collection of weather reports, is one more test of poetry. And what is most striking about this book is that it aces the test. There is something wonderfully celebratory and shockingly pleasant and stimulatingly interesting about reading day after day of weather gone by"--Juliana Spahr.

The Weather

Make Now Press

Poetry.The latest in Goldsmith's transcription and defamiliarization efforts, TRAFFIC exhibits the author's signature mode: remediating found texts and crossing artifice with everyday life". "In both form and content, Kenneth Goldsmith's TRAFFIC recalls nothing so much as the extended tracking shot in Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Week-End, and the book's audacious sustain elicits the same series of responses: surprise, admiration, amusement, incredulity, horror, recognition, terror, boredom, impatience, awe...."--Craig Dworkin.

Traffic

Poetry. SPORTS, the last of Kenneth Goldsmith's American trilogy (THE WEATHER, TRAFFIC, and SPORTS), is a complete radio transcription of the longest nine inning Major League Baseball game on record. As with the rest of the trilogy, Goldsmith's exact parsing of language is used to articulate an unfolding narrative. Nothing is left out: in SPORTS we hear every utterance and stumble of the announcers as well as each ad broadcast during the game. It is said that in a normal two and a half hour baseball game, approximately eight minutes of action occurs; this game--the New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox from August of 2006--lasts nearly five hours, doubling the language, leaving the broadcasters a seeming eternity to fill with a parade of endless statistics and in-booth repartee. As the narrative grinds on and the hours pass, a claustrophobic sense of despair descends upon the booth. "Tomorrow?" asks one broadcaster. "I think we're all writing opuses for tomorrow."

Sports

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goldsmith, Kenneth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Goldsmith, Kenneth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goldsmith, Kenneth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wasting Time on the Internet

Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb

No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96

73 Poems

The Weather

Traffic

Sports