Still from Mass Ornament (2009)

As the final event of  the sixth Video Vortex, YouTube lovers, video artists, and enthusiasts of all types were invited to enjoy an evening screening and discussion with media artist Natalie Bookchin. The screening was held in SMART Project Space Amsterdam, hard to find but a great location.

On Tuesday March 15th, the program started at 19:30 with Bart Rutten (Stedelijk Museum) introducing artist Natalie Bookchin. While Bookchin was  one of the speakers of the Video Vortex conference,  this evening was set up to give her the opportunity to discuss  and show the audience more of her work, and  engage in an intimate and lively discussion with Rutten and the audience. Bookchin showed us three of her works: Trip (2008), Mass Ornament (2009), and the pieces of her Testament series (2009), with great audience response. She even showed one of her newest work-in-progress chapter of  the  Testament series, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, asking us the audience for feedback, and their response to her work.

Want to know what the response was?

All  discussion, questions, answers and comments have been noted in a detailed report. It’s a great read that covers in detail the conversation that took place between Natalie, Bart and the audience that evening. The full report will be posted to the blog in a few days! Check back soon!

Koen Leurs - 'Vernacular Spectacles? Dutch-Moroccan Youth on Youtube'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

After praising the wonderful lunch that was sure to revitalize the Video Vortex audience, Koen Leurs introduces his topic: the YouTube use of Dutch-Moroccan youth, born in the Netherlands but with natively Moroccan parents. Leurs explains how the right-wing politics in Holland are casting a shadow of negativity on the former immigrants and how the media present us with a black and white image. Anti-immigration, islamophobia, ‘Kopvoddentaks’ and street terrorists have become widely known and supported terms.

Koen shows us a video, a news report about the short film “Kop of Munt” , which shares a thought as to what would happen if all Moroccans would leave Holland. It’s meant sarcastically, but the media has picked it up as a heavy subject and made a fuss.

All this negative media attention causes presumptions about Dutch-Moroccan youth. But it is interesting to see them as they really are and perhaps how they handle all the bad news. Leurs wanted to find out how they constitute their identity through YouTube.

Koen Leurs – Video Vortex

Being a PhD student in Gender Studies at the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University, Leurs executed surveys (1500+) and in-depth interviews (43) with the subjects (Dutch-Moroccan youth between the age of 12 and 18), as well as an analysis of the digital material. He found that the DM youth use YouTube more often than Dutch youth and that it’s more woven into their everyday life. He also found that there are three ways of consumption for the DM youth. First, the nostalgic, ‘vernacular spectacles’. It is nostalgic longing for a home that no longer exists or has ever existed (Boym 2001). YouTube is their home in a sense, as the youngsters are ‘watching movies about where we come from’. The clips are symbolic anchors, a symbolic travel to a real, and at the same time magical place. Second is the consumption of differential music, ‘video’s of affinity’, such as those of Ali B and Yes-R. Third there is the knowledge brokering, which stands for a more broad and globally oriented consumption. Important to note here, is that this assumption parallels with the three types of orientation for migrated youth that Hepp, Bozdag and Suna found: origin-oriented, ethno-oriented and world-oriented.

What’s most important is that the Dutch-Moroccan youth doesn’t fit into boxes. They constitute their own identity, for a portion through the use of YouTube and other media, and combine practices and the best of three worlds (past home, present home and global culture). Above all, they watch clips that do not correspond with the negative mainstream opinion at all. Yes, they are positioned in a situation of in-betweenness, but the Dutch-Moroccan youth in Holland knows its way around the web and consumes what it likes best, not willing to apply to the negative public sphere.

Natalie Bookchin in conversation with Geert Lovink. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Artist Natalie Bookchin took time to talk to Geert Lovink about online video and her artistic practice at yesterday’s Video Vortex #6 in Amsterdam.

To open the conversation, Natalie screened Laid Off, a part of her series Testament, which offered a 4-minute impression of her work, capturing the current global financial situation and mass unemployment in the US.

Laid Off

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below is part 1 of the conversation we got to hear between Geert Lovink and Natalie Bookchin, and adapted to include further information.

G: You’re teaching at CalArts, you worked in the 90’s with the internet, developed games, and now suddenly you’re working with online video. How did you stumble into this?

N: I had also been very involved in thinking about online space as a site not only to make work but to distribute and exhibit it.

In the 90s I had been working, distributing, and exhibiting my work online. In  2005, I began to find the Internet too noisy and too crowded, and wanted to return to offline space in my work. I began to collect images from private security webcams that I found through a glitch in Google’s search engine technology which picked up thousands of webcams regardless of whether or not they are intended to be public. The cameras offered an unusual view of the contemporary global landscape mediated through surveillance technology. I became interested in depicting the world as it was described by the technology, and so rather than looking at the recording devices in the landscape, I looked through the cameras, drawing attention to the formal elements of this perspective, its odd and awkward angles of view and composition, its often fixed perspective, the limited tonal range, the dirty lens, and the distance from and limited contact or lack of relationship between the camera — which has no operator present — and its subject. From this material I developed, Network Movies, a series of videos and video installations that I made between 2005 and 2007, where I sampled data flows of images from webcams from around the world to create portraits of global landscapes. Limited bandwidth and cheap cameras produced jumpy, mechanical motion and grainy, low-resolution images that revealed their technological conditions and were reminiscent of early cinema.  I began to make installations and videos offline, in order to provide a more embodied experience, absent in the distracted online space –with its small screen and potential for multitasking.

G: Your video work that uses online footage started with one installation didn’t it? When was the first one?

N: The first piece I made with YouTube footage was trip – a 63-minute single-channel video I completed in 2008, in which I documented a trip around the world using clips I culled from YouTube.  From these clips, I pieced together a trip around the world from the point of view of tourists, human rights workers, locals, soldiers, and many others.  The first point perspective put viewers in the position of a continually changing figure of the traveler, driving from tourist destination, across borders, and through war zones.

G: It’s a gallery installation piece with the look and feel of a collaborative global road movie. There you have your first experiences of making databases, how you select the videos and put them together. Let’s talk more about your approach. Now that we’ve seen Laid Off, it appears that it really must have been an enormous amount of work. It looks very complex. Technically, how did you do this? The syncing?

N: There is no database, nothing is automated – I simply searched, watched and collected the videos. For me, YouTube is in many ways a big heap of trash, out of which, with a lot of digging, treasures can be found. It’s not a platform so much as a site that hosts (and buries) videos. I don’t think it’s a community- so calling it social media is a misnomer. I don’t think there is conversation to be had on it through boxes for comments, or likes or dislikes. So I search.

I search for videos with an idea of what I hope to find, but I am often taken in unexpected directions. For example, with my current work-in-progress Now he’s out in public and everyone can see, I began with the idea that I was going do a piece about the reenactment and retelling of the recent Tiger Woods scandal. As I watched videos, I saw vloggers suddenly slip from discussing Woods, to Obama, or O.J. Simpson or Michael Jackson, or other African American public figures who had also been involved in media-driven scandals. As I watched and edited the videos and realized that the slips were key to the piece, it no longer became a piece about Tiger Woods, but instead about blackness as scandal. This was something I hadn’t known when I started the piece. The way I find and work with material is not and can’t be automated because it is through the process of searching and watching that I discover what it is I am making.

G: Ok, but let’s go back to your method, maybe you know the book by Richard Senatt, The Craftsman. When I think of you painfully putting this together, it’s like a digital craft, not using sophisticated software. But you use sophisticated ways to search for terms, in different languages.

N: Yes, for Trip I did search in different languages. In general, I use many combinations of keywords as I search, and I revise my search terms often as I develop each work. You’ve discussed in previous Video Vortex conferences the subjectivity of tags, which in some ways is very useful for me as I search, but it can also make it very difficult to find videos. I have many problems with the way YouTube structures its search engine – I’m not looking for the most popular videos, I’m looking for the most varied.

G: A lot of the videos you use are very personal. Are the people in these clips talking to family or friends?

N: Sometimes the vloggers make reference to other vloggers or to their subscribers, but mostly they don’t. They have all chosen to make their videos public – to make a public speech. Because of the layers of mediation, and because they are mostly at home in private spaces, their speech often becomes intimate, which creates a tension between the sometimes excruciating privateness of their speech and location, and the very publicness of the screening venue.

My Meds

Click here to view the embedded video.

N: In this one it’s not so much about the individuals, it’s much more about the choral group speaking together, in some way, in the other one there is a sense of individual personality that comes through at certain moments and then fades back into a collective voice.

G: Your work really reflects on theories of online subjectivity, new liberal labour and living conditions. It’s amazing to see this visualised. You can read a lot of books about the individual lives that people have, which you bring together in your work. Did this grow out of theoretical notions like the multitude, in which people retain their individual voices but are nonetheless part of something bigger?

N: In Mass Ornament I thought a lot about the relation of the individual to the collective, and the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Although I force a collective out of many separate individuals and spaces, the rectangular format of each video reminds viewers that ultimately each speaker, or dancer, is isolated. In this way my depiction of a collective remains partial, and produces a visual tension between the imagined collective and the isolated individual.

G: And that comes out best in Mass Ornament. It has that sentiment of them aspiring to dance together, even though they’re not aware of that when they’re filming themselves.

N: Yes, although many are in fact responding to other videos. In this way, they are dancing with an imagined community in mind.

–

End of Part 1.

Mass Ornament

Click here to view the embedded video.

G: How did you come to use this idea of a ‘mass ornament’?

N: I began with the desire to do a piece that investigated the changing online status of video. Here, the emphasis is no longer on a single isolated video but on multiple chains of related videos, chains of responses, re-enactments, and remixes, and these responses are both to previous videos in the chain or to mass culture imagery.

G: In Mass Ornament you pay special attention to the audio track, it leads you through the work. This changes in Testament, where the image itself is not carrying the sequence and the sound becomes very very important.

N: Yes that is absolutely true. Sound, or rather speech, is the determinant factor in Testament. I primarily edit for sound rather than image. At first I thought, “how in the world am I going to make it a visually compelling piece?” but it turns out that image is critical – the image of the faces of the speakers give the fragmentary speech more weight, and grounds it from descending into a series of anonymous rants.  The scale of the image in the installation and the direct gaze of the speaker to the viewer create a sense of empathy between the two. Unlike Mass Ornament, I haven’t added sound, I’ve just cleaned it up and edited it, paying attention to rhythm and musicality and of course to what is being said. In Mass Ornament, I got rid of the original music tracks from most of the clips; besides adding my own musical tracks, in some sequences I’ve added ambient sounds of the rooms and of the bodies in the rooms. I did this to individuate separate spaces and dancers, creating a presence of the room and the individuals, so that even with a unifying musical track, we would be reminded of the individual in their particular space. I did not want to depict the individual reduced to an abstraction, to a “mass ornament”.

G: To come back to this motive: a heterogeneous, participatory culture that we know, the YouTube genealogy, and turning that into a collective statement made by you as an individual artist, people nonetheless see something happening here. A transformation is taking place, going beyond what people experience and express themselves. Have you had any responses from people who simply promote participatory culture?

N: No I haven’t! Although some people do tend to be relieved that I put my videos online. There are different ways to think about participation: does participation mean allowing others to add comments or to “like” or “dislike” a video? In my projects, I am searching for more substantive participatory impulses, whether that means identifying with a social body larger than the individual, or articulating shared political subjectivities.

G: Some would be relieved that finally there’s an artist synthesizing all this noise; people are complaining about information overload, but now there is Natalie Bookchin…

N: In some way I’m just paying attention, digging for, and compiling some of the stories we are currently telling to ourselves and others online.

G: Your works are all designed to be experienced in a gallery setup, and not on a computer. Is that a step forward or step back? And are you going to keep producing only for the museum?

N: I show the work in museums, but it is also available online. Each space reaches a different audience, and provides a different experience. The work is not online art (or net.art!) although it speaks to both online and offline space. It seems appropriate to me that the viewing experience also speaks to, and is available in, both locations.

For a chance to meet Natalie Bookchin in person and have a more in depth look at her work:

Tuesday 15 March 2011
SMART Project Space
Arie Biemondstraat 101-111 (Auditorium), Amsterdam
Time: doors 19.00 / starts 19:30-21:30
Tickets: 4 euros at the door

Natalie Bookchin in conversation with Geert Lovink. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Sam Gregory - 'Remix Video, Aggregated Video and Human Rights Activism'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Sam Gregory, program director at WITNESS presented his thoughts on using online video as a political tool at Video Vortex #6 in Amsterdam yesterday.

Gregory began with presenting an image – a frame grab from the footage shot almost exactly 20 years ago, of the Rodney King beating by the Los Angeles Police Department. This footage, not only generated massive media attention and debate in the USA, but was the seed for WITNESS – to support the use of video in Human Rights advocacy to change policies, behaviours, laws and practices.

Video activism and video advocacy was the main focus of Gregory’s presentation.

“With the ever-increasing availability of tools to create, share everyday video; witnessing and documentation of Human Rights violation is becoming increasingly commonplace, across amateurs to professionals”.

There were two points he raised regarding uploading to YouTube. First, the ubiquity of video is not evenly distributed. Secondly, the notion of access: should it be online and will it be effective online? How will these videos reach areas where there is no Internet access or mobile access to be engaged in it?

Gregory then presented a series of videos to depict what the Ecosystem of Human Rights video looks like, made up of commercial and non-commercial platforms.

“It is as much as the individual speaking out as well as the graphic imagery” he says.

“It’s not just about the graphic violations of Human Rights such as torture, suppression of street protests; much of it is documenting economic social cultural rights: rights to housing…”.

Many videos uploaded recently have been demonstrative of the current circumstances in Egypt, Tunisia & Libya. For example the video blog of Asmaa Mahfouz, created 2 days after January 25 includes a number of moments that are already iconic even a month later in terms of incidents that happened in Egypt.

And this: The most AMAZING video on the internet #egypt #jan25

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through the recent events in the last few months, he highlights two points:

1. HOW DO WE DEAL WITH THIS MASS OF INFORMATION?
Gregory quotes Jane Gaines, who wrote in the context of the Iraq war about the prejudice of our culture being “bombarded with images”, and we never talk about being “bombarded with words”. He believes moving beyond this is critical if we want to engage meaningfully in this field of ubiquitous video.

In the past two months have witnessed the flourishing of more institutional tool-based ways to think about aggregation and curation. Tools such as Ushahidi that allow crowdmapping of photos, videos, text, Crowdvoice.org created in the Middle East, Storify, aggregates social media including facebook and twitter, and CitizenTube.

Challenges: this type of curation is good for realtime protest-based situations, but less good for collective voices, and he references the Q&A session with artist Natalie Bookchin – how an individual story/event can be captured in a larger context.

2. OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH THESE COMMERCIAL SPACES
Gregory questions of the role of commercial video sharing and the reliance of these platforms. They are not public spaces but a private space and use of it is governed by an agreement.

“Hosting a political video on YouTube is like holding a rally in a shopping mall. It looks like a public space, but it’s not.”

He concludes with his picture of the changing landscape:

“As we think about online video, it has these modalities of accessibility, credibility, malleability, fluidity and they allow this incredible sense of transparency, participation and action, but they also raise a lot of concerns about authenticity, about point of view, about control and how those images transform into action.”

Read more:

http://blog.witness.org/2011/01/cameraseverywhere

Sam Gregory, ‘Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent’, page 268. Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube.

Arjon Dunnewind - 'Impakt Channel: Content with Context'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Being the festival, artistic and general director of Impakt, Arjon Dunnewind is in charge of a database of art related content for which he has to decide the most appropriate way of uploading to the web. An important factor to take into account, he explains, is that the audience on the web has different expectations than ‘offline audience’. Online archives are the next phase and make us rethink how we structure the art collection, connect both the online and offline audience  and exploit the merits of the online environment to use them in the best possible way.

How to involve an audience?
According to Dunnewind this can be done by providing the viewers quality instead of quantity. This means no comment space below the art content. Arjon would rather have a platform without any comments than low quality comments and spam on his channel. Moderation and hierarchy are keywords for the Impakt Channel, only inviting experts to give their opinion and opening little by little. Arjon wouldn’t mind never to open it for ordinary users though – as it can degrade the quality.

Legal issues
A struggle for Dunnewind are the legal issues. Foremost, who is responsible for the content and the legal issues is not always clear. While being online for supposedly 20 years, only since 5 years has there been options for artists as to in which degree their work is allowed to be published. There is no standard agreement with the artists (all permission has to be confirmed in direct contact with the artist) and more importantly: the artists themselves haven’t always cleared the legal issues of the materials used in their pieces. On the sunny side of the legal issues is that the organization is relatively small, so they don’t receive a lot of complaints. Also there is not much historical material in the database and the legal methods Impakt uses now actually bond the artist and the organization really well. Which results in allowing to put the work online.

The Impakt Channel : Give context to content. Or: how to make a difference
To differentiate yourself from video websites such as YouTube – which offer little to no context -  could be done in various ways. To Arjon, a way is to do that is to offer unique content. Also building a unique platform with alternate possibilities and limitations is a manner. Furthermore, connecting the online channel with the offline events, art projects and festivals, including bonus material for example, are adequate ways to create context. As are the display of background information, articles, introductions and comments by invited experts, interviews and curatorial texts from the original programs.

All that said, Arjon concludes with his wish for the online Impakt environment. ‘We want the Impakt Channel to become a new platform’, he says. A platform that creates exhibitions online, a flexible, dynamic, autonomous space on which can be experimented.

Rachel Somers Miles and Geert Lovink addressing the authors and audience during the launch of the second Video Vortex reader. Photo by Anne Helmond.

On Saturday, the 12th of March 2011, a few minutes before six, the second Video Vortex reader was being presented to the audience of the sixth edition of the Video Vortex conference. Editors Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles invited the contributors to the second volume, who were present en masse, to celebrate the launch of the book on stage.

Rachel Somers Miles. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Rachel Somers Miles and Video Vortex Reader II Contributors. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Rachel Somers Miles, Video Vortex Reader II Contributors and Geert Lovink. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Video Vortex Reader II contributors. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Annelies Termeer - 'Instant Cinema: Sharing the Screen'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Annelies Termeer was the third speaker during the lecture themed It’s Not a Dead Collection, It’s a Dynamic Database. She is ad interim head of digital presentation at the EYE Film Institute, formerly known as the Film Museum. The project she is affliated with is called InstantCinema. The goal of the website is to facilitate filmmakers with a platform that affords them to easily upload their films and connect with likeminded people. An important part of the target audience exists of experimental filmmakers, who now have a platform that has the ability to unite the separate spheres of the online communities, the art world and the film world.

The key subject in the overarching theme was that the preservation of works online offered a way in which the curators could add value through contextualizing the artists and their artwork, which is supposed to lead to a richer experience for the public engaging with those works. Furthermore, in the case of InstantCinema, a big factor in the succes was the establishing of a trusting relationship between the artists and the organization. The filmmakers would be offered an easy-to-use platform. As Termeer explained, InstantCinema wanted to make film widely available providing a complementary platform towards existing establishments such as the museum, specialized film festivals and cinémathèques

Termeer explained that the project came about through the shared inititiative of L.A. based Dutchmen Rene Daalder, who is a writer and filmmaker, and Folkert Gorter, and interaction designer. The technical framework, the content management system of the project, originated in a few of their earlier projects, namely SpaceCollective.org, a cross-media platform where the future of human existence is being discussed and CargoCollective.com, which functions as a platform on which graphic artists can easily share their work.

In Termeer’s view, InstantCinema has the important socio-cultural function to show the similarities between different forms of media-art. The site, located at www.instantcinema.org, has several features with which it tries to provide a quality alternative to commercial distribution platforms. It offers a high image quality and a solid content management system. It also has a feature that enables communitybuilding. As you can see on the image below, the left of the website exists of curated works, and the right side offers contributed work by artists:

After describing the website, Termeer expanded on what challenges the creators faced. One of the obstacles that arose, was that it was taking far more time than expected to finish the platform. Besides that, there were the usual problems surrounding intellectual property rights with curated works. They also had to adapt the Cargo systems, making them able to house videomaterial. As Termeer explained, much consideration went into which format was being used, keeping quality standards and such in mind. Video would have to be streamable, while the works would retain a high quality.

She went on to point out that, in order to grow organically while at the same time maintaining a high standard for the artwork that would be submitted, InstantCinema would use invitation models for the filmmakers, like Google used them for Gmail. Every artist would be allowed to invite 5 other artists, thereby granting them a degree of control over the content on the site. Moderation would therefore be a shared burden for the community and the owners.

Looking ahead, Termeer sees several further goals. She points out that the aim of the project is to establish an even closer connection between the site and other offline events that are being organised by EYE. InstantCinema seems to celebrate the openness and connectivity that the web has to offer. The question remains how big its repository will become. By granting an accessible platform to experimental filmmakers, and taking away the obscurity of the ‘art-film’ by offering the public 24/7 online access to this valuable resource, InstantCinema seems eager to see what the future holds in store for it and how big the community will turn out to be. The project is still in its early days and over time we will see if the caterpillar will gloriously emerge from its cocoon as a butterfly, or if it will remain modest in the safe surroundings of its protective shell a little while longer.

Further info:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/anneliestermeer
Contact InstantCinema: info@instantcinema.org

Annelies Termeer’s presentation can be found here (PDF format).

Sandra Fauconnier – 'Mediating Video Art Online'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

Sandra Fauconnier, working as an archiver for the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk), delivered a speech about video art distribution during the overarching theme It’s Not a Dead Collection, It’s a Dynamic Database. The NIMk curates and distributes works of art online through its website, which contains a searchable catalogue. The archive contains objects ranging from the seventies to contemporary works by established as well as upcoming Dutch and foreign artists. Fauconnier spoke about the ways in which the shift from the pre-digital to the digital era has faced the NIMk with challenges to how it was archiving its works.

Commercial enterprises such as YouTube, Vimeo and Ubuweb could become a nuisance, as they offer (semi-)legal ways to access works of art, while possibly not preserving the quality of the work and/or hurting the author’s intellectual property rights.

The strong relation between the artist and the NIMk is an important source of its success. Fauconnier gave some interesting examples of artists that contribute to the NIMk. First off, she talked about Marina Abramovic, a performance video-artist, who had been reluctant to show her work online.

Contrary to the former, Fauconnier mentioned Oliver Laric as an artist that embraces the web both as an inspiration and a distribution platform. Laric comments on popular culture by reappropriating and critiquing it in his work. Fauconnier cited Versions, a project of Laric from 2009:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In these examples, we see a paradox between old and new media. Artists like Abramovic want to maintain the control over their works. As Fauconnier explained, they try to protect the exclusivity that is their business model and avoid their works being pirated, or having to deal with other forms of unauthorized (re-)use. Another reason Fauconnier offered was that the web might not be the right context in which the artist’s work needs to be experienced. This argument is at once of a technical and aesthetic nature, because the internet might not be the proper medium for the work to be viewed through. Also, there is the added danger that work could be showcased in deteriorated quality.

Fauconnier underlined the advantages the web has to offer, and the ambitions of the NIMk to contribute ever more as a quality filter for the public and as a mediator for artists in the online sphere. She mentioned that the preservation of the works needs to be done in a sustainable way, always having the interests of the artists at heart. The NIMk tries to do so by offering a flexible licensing system when renting out work, and by aggregating content on other platforms, like educational websites. The institute is also engaging on a European level, with Europeana, a project funded by the EU that offers access to international archives and collections, by acting as a gateway.

Fauconnier then explained the several goals the NIMk strives for. Firstly, it tries to consolidate a solid infrastructure so that interested parties are able to engage with the artworks in a meaningful way by offering a contextualized experience. Secondly, there is a participatory nature to the project. Artists will be able to receive active input from the actual stakeholders and ‘connoisseurs’, the artists, curators and researchers, as Fauconnier put it. The institute thus plays an important role within the preservation of culture, by linking their online activities (the catalogue) to their offline events (for example, ‘de MediaKunstMobiel‘ or MediaArtMobile).

In the ongoing process of digitizing both old and new artworks, Fauconnier and the NIMk search for new ways of making video art more accessible through the website. There is, however, as she points out in her contribution to the second VideoVortex reader, an increasing amount of pressure upon cultural organizations – their positions being rendered ‘precarious’ by the current economical and political climate, as she put it. Someone in the public resonated that feeling, when he asked what the panel thought about the fact that many projects such as the NIMk, InstantCinema and Impakt exist alongside eachother. Is there a possibility that some would be rendered redundant? Fauconnier jokingly commented on that, when speaking on the subject of copyright issues within the curated works. She said: ‘We are small enough, so that people don’t notice’. That blessing may turn out to become a problematic issue in the near future.

Sandra Fauconnier’s presentation can be found here (PDF format).

Catrien Schreuder - 'ArtTube: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

First things first: ArtTube is not an art collection database, and is not an archive; it is an educational platform bringing videos about art and design. With this remark Catrien Schreuder opened her presentation on Museum Boijmans van Beningen‘s video platform, ArtTube. This amidst a panel, “It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database,” where indeed art collections and archives predominated.

Though her presentation in itself didn’t shed any particular new concepts or ideas to the field of online video platforms, things did get interesting once the question and answer started. In her presentation Schreuder had commented on how the interactive parts of their website weren’t being used much, but rather were filled with spam. This triggered questions from the audience on the possibility that they were gatekeeping too much (limiting the videos on ArtTube mainly to content produced by the museum and its authorized experts). Furthermore, a member from the audience asked: “Isn’t a new platform’s worst nightmare no visitors, no content, no comments and no participation instead of spam?” After all, the title of this panel put the emphasis on the dynamism of video collections online, a dynamism that is often associated with user participation, connectivity and interactivity.

Schreuder replied to this by emphasizing one of the most priviledged concepts of the panel: context. Since videos are so easily shared online what makes their particular platform special and significant was precisely the context they are able to provide as an art institution, as an online platform with videos on art from a very specific kind of source, a museum. She remarked that they are a knowledge institution, and though they do want to connect with the public “we want to share our knowledge as well as connect with the public,” and as a museum “we are expected to offer information.”

Sandra Fouconnier from the Netherlands Media Arts Institute (NIMK) seemed to agree when she observed on a similar lack of user participation in her institution’s platform that “the content that we offer is quite specific, it is not something that people see everyday . . . first they just want to learn about it.” Earlier in the panel, Arjon Dunnewind from Impakt Festival, had remarked that with regards to comments in their curated video art platform it seemed logical to first privilege experts and then slowly open up to the “average user.”

Schreuder also mentioned that there are different kinds of environments and types of interacting and sharing. In their case, as a museum, “our share function is a more likely way of participation,” than for example leaving comments or discussing the videos in ArtTube itself. This, she hypothesized, probably happens in the users “own environment.”

“Our website is not the place where people go to discuss our videos, they go there to get the information” she concluded.

A bit more on ArtTube

The idea of creating something like ArtTube started around 2008 with the Museum Boijmans van Beningen’s experience that video is a very popular media to inform people. The museum had been using video as one of the ways to complement its exhibitions and better inform the visitors about what they where seeing. ArtTube started with the idea that those videos should be online too, not just on YouTube but on the museum’s own website since, like most of the speakers in this panel, Schreuder emphasized the importance of context with regards to video sharing platforms.

As part of this effort of providing context the videos in ArtTube has notes with details and links to things being talked about in the video. Furthermore, the museum’s website also offers other interactive platforms such as ALMA, an online database for exploring the relationship between objects and their depiction in art, and MijnBoijman.nl where the user can create its own exhibitions from the museum’s available collections.

Even though originally, the videos in ArtTube were not made for an online platform but rather for visitors to the museum (which may differ considerably from the kind of audience that’ll use an online video platform), eventually the museum started to produce more varied types of videos. As Schreuder said, they didn’t want a dead collection “with boring talking heads.” And so they started making small documentaries of people working in the museum, timetravelling series on the links within the museum’s different collections, interviews with artists and videos of events happening in the museums.

You can find Schreuder’s presentation here.