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

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

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.

(Part 2 of 2 – In conversation with Natalie Bookchin)

Mass Ornament

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”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Patrícia Dias da Silva - 'Joining the Online Video Conversation? The Presence of Institutional Actors on YouTube'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

The second day of the Video Vortex conference at Trouw in Amsterdam. In the seventh session Patrícia Dias da Silva, a PhD Fellow in Social Sciences at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, talks about how YouTube has been embraced by European institutional actors, and how YouTube is reaching out to traditional actors and media, instead of maintaining an ‘alternative’ posture which nowadays is more connected to the Vimeo platform.

YouTube allows political institutions to reach out to their audiences in a visual and interactive way by creating online video channels, posting videos, and using the social tools around the video. CitizenTube was initiated by YouTube as a political VLog in 2008 and initially had strong focus on the US elections but expanded and grew toward a platform for citizen journalism around the world. It showed a first step towards the use of online video for a political and journalistic purpose and to engage an audience to respond, comment, and interact with the videos that are posted and perspectives that are shared.

The use and appliance of new media technologies and platforms by the European Commission was first described in the eEurope initiative from 1999. There was a strong believe the internet would revive the economy and provide new economic and political changes for Europe. A first attempt to use the YouTube platform to reach out and interact with ‘European citizens’ was the Questions for Europe channel in collaboration with EuroNews. It allowed people to ask questions by posting videos which would be answered by members of the European Commission.

In 2007 EUTube was launched after the failed introduction of the European constitution to engage with citizens and to create a community of voices. It was a first step from the European Parliament to engage and connect with European citizens by using online video and the reach of the YouTube platform. With the tagline ‘sharing the sights and sounds of Europe’ it was a noble attempt to gather the different perspectives around Europe and create a dialogue about the road that Europe should be heading. The channel launched in four different languages of which English was the most popular. The channel showed reports about the EU, people in the field working for Europe, and institutional videos to promote projects and departments.

After showing some examples of the institutional use of the YouTube platform, Patrícia Dias da Silva brings up several discussion points about the use and success of these initiatives. First, the European politicians saw and used YouTube as a static archive, as a collection of videos all stored on one online channel, instead of being a dynamic archive. It was used as an aggregation of the appearance of public figures and politicians in other news media, speeches, and personal items. For example, the channel of the Berlusconi government is mainly showing videos from his own news networks.

As a second point of discussion da Silva shows how institutional videos often disable the ability to comment on videos and start discussions with other users. So on the one hand YouTube is used to reach out and allow interaction between Institutions and ‘the people’, but the functionalities provided by YouTube are disabled. The British Prime Minister David Cameron disabled comments on his videos but allowed interaction on his personal website. A third point of discussion is the low participation on YouTube channels with political ambitions. The Norwegian Prime Minister requested video questions on his YouTube channels resulting in only 5 responses. The same was the result from a similar initiative by the European Commission and EuroNews with the Questions for Europe channel. Most videos were uploaded by EuroNews and hardly any question were uploaded by participants themselves. Fourthly, a problem faced by many channels was the flaming and trolling in the comments of the uploaded videos, an important reason to disable the comment functionality. As Margot Wallstrom, former European Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication, described ‘The level of intelligence is low, and closing the board would improve the décor of EUTube’.

A fifth point of discussion questioned if the channels were used for increased participation, or as propaganda channels for European perspectives and regulations. People do not believe the motives of participation but see it as government funded propaganda. The sixth, and last point noted by da Silva is the frivolous nature of some videos posted by politicians and institutions to attract more viewers and comments. As an example she refers to Spanish video ‘Votar és un plaer’ (Voting is enjoyment) video place by the Joventut Socialista de Catalunya in which a woman is having an orgasm while voting. This practice results in flagged videos (18+) and comments and discussion on the use of video by political institutions.

We can conclude that governments and political institutions are struggling with how to use online video platforms to reach out and connect with the people. As noted by da Silva, they often see YouTube channels as repositories for videos; as dead databases. They miss the dynamics and interactivity these tools provide in creating a narrative for an online audience. By engaging the public with, for example, social media tools, you can get them involved. However, people tend to see social media initiatives by politicians as manipulation or propaganda tools without a real interest in the interactive participatory side of the story. Flaming and trolling in comments, a low engagement, and the lack of interactivity, often results in declining attention from both the public and the initiators after which participation dies out. As long as institutions do not see and use the added value of online video platforms, these initiatives will fail. It would be a good strategy to look at the activist use of online video, for example in the middle east, and how public engagement results in active participation and valuable discussions.

About the author: Geert Faber graduated with a Master of Science degree in Business Administration from the Free University in Amsterdam and is currently graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in Media & Culture specializing in New Media and Television studies.

On Twitter: @GeertFaber

By Nicola Bozzi

Andrew Clay - 'The YouTube Rich List: A List of Riches?'. Photo by Anne Helmond.

A media theorist and lecturer at Leicester’s De Montfort University, Andrew Clay has been investigating online video for some time. As an opener of the sixth edition of Video Vortex, his intervention explored YouTube and effectively went a bit beyond, as the Reader tagline suggests. The British theorist raised several compelling questions about the popular video sharing platform, inspiring the audience to ask quite a few questions at the end. In particular, his analysis of the top YouTubers – the ones who got rich by putting serial sketches online and engaging the community – took stock of the YouTube experience so far, focusing on the blurrier and blurrier distinction between amateurs and professionals.

Criticizing taste-based evaluations of content such as Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, Clay took notice of the most successful video genres – that is, comedy and entertainment-enhanced news. What seems to be the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon to the British professor, though, is the community and the networking possibilities that it enables. Top YouTubers not only partake in the same superstardom, amplified by increasing collaborations with each other, but also have the capacity to engage the audience in a participatory media space, as well as casual crowds.

Apart from the YouTube-specific discourse, Clay put the platform in relation to other preexisting media – like Mtv, once the mainstream source for edgy content – and pondered on future developments. For example, it is clear that the website wants to get more and more involved with television, while maintaining and extending its online supremacy even by schooling and workshops in less media-savvy countries – a bit like Current TV did in its early days.

If YouTube’s merit has been that of bringing niche into the mainstream – narrowing the technical gap between professionals and amateurs – according to Clay there is a deeper, hidden purpose that drives people to struggle in order to establish their niche presence on the internet giant’s surface. Quoting German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he argues such focus on inauthentic lives is a human attenpt to scare death away. We don’t know if the Annoying Orange will be forever remembered, but it might definitely survive its author.

Andrew Clay at Video Vortex. Photo by Anne Helmond

For Andrew Clay’s presentation see, here

HT to Mirdos Leon, source:uknown

On the 25th of July thousands of people from all over the world uploaded movies about their lives to YouTube. They all collaborate on the movie ‘Life in a Day’, a historical experiment to create a movie about one single day on earth. Out of more then 80.000 sent in videos, with more than 4,500 hours of film, director Kevin Macdonald made a 90 minute long documentary. The film had been premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States. Five of the contestants are Dutch: Meijke Van Herwijnen, Esther Happy, Frank de Vries, Jaap Dijkstra and Jan van Etten.

See here the trailer of ‘Life in a day‘.

Call for entries text from Tuesday, July 6, 2010 for ‘Life in a Day’.

Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mold them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of “Life in a Day,” a historic cinematic experiment that will attempt to do just that: document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of your life on camera. You can film the ordinary — a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighborhood soccer match, or the extraordinary — a baby’s first steps, your reaction to the passing of a loved one, or even a marriage.

Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of films such as The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void and One Day in September, will then edit the most compelling footage into a feature documentary film, to be executive produced by Ridley Scott, the director behind films like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise, Blade Runner and Robin Hood. LG Electronics is supporting “Life in a Day” as a key part of its long-standing Life’s Good campaign and to support the creation of quality online content that can be shared and enjoyed by all.

The film will premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and if your footage makes it into the final cut, you’ll be credited as a co-director and may be one of 20 contributors selected to attend the premiere.

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

2010 has finished, and yes, this is a big deal for Online Video; for such a young thing, every turn in the calendar is, and this is a big turn in the calendar. Not only a year, but a whole decade comes to an end, and looking back we can see that each year offered milestones for video on the web: 2000 to 2005 was the prehistory of online video with some small sites mostly offering video downloads that one played locally. In 2005 Skype introduced videocalls and not yet knowing its monumental consequence, YouTube was born. In 2006 YouTube was bought by Google and by 2007 it consumed as much bandwidth as all of the Internet did in 2000. Video had already changed the whole deal of the Internet.

In 2009 the iPhone joined the party and became a major player in online video with the release of the iPhone 3GS, the first model to include a video camera, multiplying uploads to Youtube by 4 in the first week. Now, about 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube – in other words, there are almost 6 new years of video available only on YouTube.

But there’s online video beyond Youtube. A good example is Vimeo, a site that was actually born one year before Google’s video giant. With a different purpose, focusing on user created content, it has grown to become one of the biggest video sites, and the standard online video web platform for audiovisual creators, with a large artist user-base.

Three big online broadcasting companies (Justin.TV, UStream and LiveStream) were founded in 2007, and have continued to grow, making internet broadcasting accessible to anyone and more and more common. Websites focused on entertaining clips like Metacafe or Dailymotion have expanded non- stop following YouTube’s footsteps, and Facebook having integrated video sharing feels like centuries ago. Videochat expanded from Skype to all other major IM services (MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Gmail…), and even more traditional media companies like newspapers include videos in their online editions now, with some social-video news on their way to becoming mainstream (like the dutch zie.nl).

If we look to a different screen, the one found within our living rooms, we can see how PlayStation3, Xbox360, Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and, more recently, GoogleTV have been progressively half taking-over, half partnering with the traditional audiovisual industry networks to bring online video to our televisions.
But it’s not all about the platforms. Online video is maturing as fast as the technology that supports it makes possible. We’ve seen the constant increase in the resolution of video, 3D online video is a reality (as we wrote a few weeks ago), and HTML5 and the new possibilities it will bring are around the corner. With a need to rule and organize on the go, the basis for open video online (referring, by open, to both content and techology) are also in constant evolution: WebM, Wikimedia, open video databases such as the Open Images project (facilitated by the Netherlands-based Institute for Sound and Vision)…we can be sure that the next generation of online video is coming, and it will be here sooner than later.

Nevertheless, and in spite of the great growth that online video has had (and is expected to keep having), not all the stories are about success. 2010 was also the year of Chatroulette, a Russian company that allows users to randomly video-chat with other users and jump to a new random connection at any time in the exchange. It achieved great popularity, created some Internet celebrities and had some real celebrities talking about it and taking part…and after being one of the year’s big hypes…it just vanished. Today you can still visit Chatroulette, but the number of users has dropped drastically, and it’s now an internet old glory, just like Altavista or Lycos.

When looking for something more tangible than all of these proliferating platforms and formats, we find the people behind the videos, with the greatest example being the important role online video played in Obama’s presidential run in 2008 showing, for the first time, the potential and power of this media.

But what will we see in this new decade? Will online video evolve into open video practices? Will it get shaped into a new industry controlled product delivering professional content to our homes and devices? Will people still watch “Charlie bit my finger” in 2020? Or going a little further: will people still gather around a screen after a dinner to watch the latest YouTube hit?

Well, it’s impossible to tell right now, and if good news is we’ll certainly have the answer in only ten years, excellent news is that the process and the daily discovery will be amazing and exciting.
Welcome into a new era.

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

Ever since Avatar came out 3D seems to be the magical word that makes any movie a blockbuster. All of a sudden, the audiovisual entertainment industry (films, TV and videogames) has been trying to convince us that a 2D world doesn’t make sense anymore, releasing all kind of 3D products, from movies to Television sets & TV channels, videogames, cameras and photography books.

Steve Jobs recently said that users don’t want to see amateur clips, that they “want Hollywood movies and TV shows (…) they want professional content and everything in HD”. Of course this is not necessarily true (although some of his thousands of fans might take his word as gospel), but the truth is that big feature films are now easily reachable online (HULU, Netflix, Apple TV…) and the times of terrible quality pirate videos seems to be on its way out. So, no matter if the competition is Youtube or professional content, the truth now is that you can have good movies in HD and even decent popcorn at home.

In this era of the movie theater at home, the film industry needed something to get people back to the cinema, to enhance the experience and add something you can’t have from the comfort of your living room (besides avoiding the costs, the queues, the car ride, the parking…), and they decided it would be 3D.

After a year where the motto seemed to be you just need to make it 3D to make it a success, it looks like theaters won’t be able to hold the exclusive on 3D for as long as they would like. 3DTVs and cameras keep coming onto the market, PS3 and XBOX360 support 3D, and the Nintendo 3DS is coming out soon, with a 3D screen that doesn’t need glasses. Nevertheless, the evolution seems a little slower for the screens we spend more time on, that are our main window to the online world: phones and computers.
But, is it just a matter of time until we replace all screens for glasses-less 3D screens? Will we experience real 3D interfaces and websites anytime soon? In my opinion this doesn’t seem likely. As for online video, things are different.

Over a year ago YouTube quietly added 3D support. No big Apple-style announcement, just a new feature developed out of the endlessly productive 20% time free that all google engineers have to work on the projects that they’re passionate about (same 20% that gave birth to Gmail and Orkut). The solution, simple and elegant, has been evolving all these months, and allows you to select the 3D technology you’re using (different kinds of glasses, 3DTV or none at all to see both 2D views next to each other). Some of the other biggest online video sites like Vimeo also supports 3D.

This just shows how online video doesn’t necessarily stay in the “amateur hours” of Youtube and the artsy clips of Vimeo, but keeps and eye on the industry, not forgetting about 3D and the growing community of 3D creators that work and share their expertise online.

Interestingly, in a time when 3D is the big hype, it has been growing quietly in the guts of online video, and although most users don’t seem to notice it now (only about 5000 3D videos on Youtube!), the structure is being built so it will be ready and available when 3D screens invade the computer market.

If that finally happens (and according to the current industry tendency, it seems inevitable), Hollywood will have to find a new way to get people to theaters. Maybe they should try making good movies, that always worked.

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

There’s no doubt that the most recognizable name worldwide when talking about online video is Youtube, and when talking about modern and contemporary art, Guggenheim is one of the top institutions and brands.

We also know, although slow changes have begun in the last few years, that museums are often closed, inaccessible fortresses, where new ideas, artists and practices find little space. It’s almost utopian for a young artist, in whatever discipline they work, to imagine they will get to exhibit in a big museum. And of course, this utopian idea turns into impossibility when we exchange the artist, for amateur creator.
The democratization of media and the expansion of technology have brought the possibility of creating all kinds of content (and ultimately, art) to a vast variety of disciplines and techniques, available to virtually everybody. This means that nowadays anyone can be a creator using new media. Anybody can make videos, be a photographer, or a “published” writer, however, most frequently this remains in the online world, while the products of this phenomenon are hardly ever reflected in traditional media, platforms and institutions.

In this climate, it makes sense that Guggenheim and Youtube have come together to create the Youtube-Play biennale of online video, with a call open to everyone to submit their videos. After a long selection process, the final winners will be announced next week, and presented in the Guggenheim museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin, and then exhibited to the public for a number of days at the end of the month in Guggenheim’s New York museum.

According to artist, and Youtube-Play jury member, Takashi Murakami, it’s really interesting to see how museums are a space where the physical presence of the public is necessary for art viewing, while Youtube, as an online platform, doesn’t require the same physical proximity and offers wider accessibility. At the same time, art museums are a place where the work shown has already been deemed valuable, whereas with Youtube, the value and merit of content is often questionable. It then makes sense to see how these two giants have joined forces to merge the digital world of Youtube and the physical world of the museum, trying to open up a space in museums to amateur creation offering the public a condensed and filtered version of Youtube, with some of its best, and none of its worst.

Whether the results are artistically relevant or not, there are already some elements that point towards the project’s great success, from the submission of over 23 thousand clips, to the presence of significant figures in the jury such as the aforementioned Murakami, film director Darren Aronofsky or New York Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector. While the jury and the public will be the judge of the quality of the final 20 videos selected, and only time will tell whether Youtube and Guggenheim will make this a yearly event, Youtube-Play offers a sign that the institutionalized space of the museum is, through this gesture, trying to partially reconcile their differences with amateur/artist-made video creations and creators, and become involved with the expansive online world.

This, ultimately, can be seen as one of the many signs that typically inaccessible institutions and industries are finally recognizing, including and collaborating with online culture in various ways.

Visit the Youtube Play website here
And the project’s page in the Guggenheim foundation website here