MB: Did you think of Ubu from the beginning as being this vast, global, encyclopedia for the avant-garde? What was it at the moment that you first thought of it?
KG: At the beginning it was a repository for visual, concrete, and sound poetry. Really old dusty stuff that suddenly, when it was scanned and put online looked really beautiful and fresh. In a weird way, the theory behind so much of concrete poetry predicts the digital age. If you start to read Mark Andrés manifestos you start to see that they’re predicting so much of what became to be the internet, they just didn’t have the technology to do it so they did it on the page. But, all of that theory transfers to the web aesthetically better than any other theory that I know so it’s kind of fueled by concrete poetry, in theory.
MB: Because it’s the theory of the mobility of the word?
KG: Mostly. It was also that concrete poetry embraced the sense of iconicity—the concrete poem was an icon, right? Which was kind of a break from the line and the stanza and the verse. You can actually throw this over from computing: first you have codes and DOS [tk??] prompts which are lines, stanzas, and verse—lines and lines of code—and then you have the move to a graphical user interface which is based on the icons. So, you actually see the parallel of computing and poetry as put forth by the concrete poets being almost identical: the fast, the quick, the knowable, the universal.