The giant online video initiative “Youtube Play” is getting great attention, making it into news headlines, cultural magazines, and all over the blogosphere, including this very blog. With such a high-profile project, it’s not surprising to find a wide range of responses, some applauding Guggenheim and Youtube, while others turning a more detailed and critical eye to the specifics of the actual project.

SanctionedArray is one such project.

Put on by the collective Specify Others, SanctionedArray is a curated collection of video art placed online, with guidelines that explicitly open up the restrictions enforced during the “Youtube Play” project that excluded submissions from citizens or residents of countries sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the United States, which include Belarus, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Myanmar/Burma and Zimbabwe.

While curating, or the selection of art works within a juried competition, is already understood and generally accepted as a practice of excluding some artworks in favour of others, the initial exclusionary eligibility criteria in the Youtube-Guggenheim “Youtube Play” collaboration raises a number of important questions: in particular, why shouldn’t artists from sanctioned countries be allowed to take part in an initiative that has been overtly expressed as a global project, particularly when Andy Berndt (Vice President, Creative Lab of Google and Youtube) expresses in a promotional video that “Any video creator, all around the world, anywhere, can nominate their work”? what does this exclusion say about not only the merit of artists who are residents or citizens of these countries, but also, who constitutes “the world”?; is the ultimate goal of this restriction to block the possibilities of circulating ideas that stem from within perceived “problematic governments”, and if so, is it not only the voices of these “problematic governments” blocked, but also the voices of people within these countries, further limiting their global presence.

Whatever the responses to these questions and others might be, one truth stands, and that is that both the amount of submissions to SanctionedArray (700) which were open to residents and citizens of all countries (OFAC sanctioned or otherwise), and the number of videos selected (100), show there is a definite creative voice to be heard from those countries. The numbers become even more significant when we take a further look at the list of countries, with places like North Korea, Myanmar or Zimbabwe, where connecting to the internet is far from trivial. At the same time, it shows the solidarity of creators from non-sanctioned countries that choose to submit their works as a way to support this initiative, and therefore give it greater importance, offering participants from sanctioned countries a deserved space to share their creations, voices, expressions and ideas.

The SanctionedArray project continues with its latest phase, CuratorsArray, which encourages invited curators to select videos through using, and expanding, the SanctionedArray database.

After all, and in spite of the restriction, perhaps a positive outcome for a number of video creators from sanctioned countries was that thanks to SanctionedArray, not only their works have a space, but attention has been drawn towards the difficulties and limitations they often experience in sharing and promoting their work through digital lines, enforced both from within their countries, and from outside in the allegedly free world.

For more information take a look at the SanctionedArray website.

Or Check the terms and conditions of Youtube Play.