Hi Everyone,
Thanks Charles for posting the Ubuweb Open Letter about the many complex
issues of showing artists film online. I'd like to pick up on the highly
differentiated spatial nature of viewing film in a cinema, art gallery or
online.

The differences in terms of of scale, distance, intimacy, audience numbers,
soundscape etc are evident in the film concept and its image quality in each
context. The Ubuweb intentional screening of low res files from the web is a
sharp curatorial conceit which reveals the context of their collection of
films as a 'thumbnails' and not 'originals'. This is fairly straightforward
to understand in terms of the translation of 35mm or 16mm film into
digestible web formats. But new media has tried really hard rethink the
relationship between form and content, not just as site or
platform-specific, but as ubiquitous. The Guggenheim YouTube project
seemingly supports this notion by using the YouTube website as a platform
for submission and viewing works (but not for selection) which are then
exhibited in museums - as if a YouTube animation can survive equally well in
these different contexts.

When watching the 'winning' Guggenheim YouTube 'Animated Videos' I feel as
if I'm meant to be judging the work for a VJ selection for a London Club
night. Here creative video, some reminiscent of advertising, some
pseudo-confessional, all of which reference the older formats of film and
animation, and all seem to have upbeat pop or filmic soundtracks. Several of
the YouTube works are shorter low-res versions of original, you a watching a
'trailer' or a 'thumbnail' of the work. Others are specifically made for
YouTube, for watching on your laptop at home. Some aspire to the TV screen,
others the Cinema Screen, but none of them seem to anticipate the gallery
space.

Forgive me for being old-school, but art museums are 3D collective spaces
and not individually viewed laptops. The creation of film and the curation
of film as sculpture seems to have been lost here. Not just in terms of the
physical experience of standing in an architecture transformed by film, but
also in terms of the networked ability of the digital.

YouTube spatially flattens our viewing of moving images, which is why it's
great for selecting thumbnails, but useless for making final curatorial
decisions unless your presentation format is YouTube itself. And if that is
the case - then the spatial networked potential of YouTube could offer a
number of selection and exhibition models. What seems clear - is that the
work has been selected for a YouTube audience without challenging the medium
or expectations of YouTube itself (except perhaps the film calling us to
unplug). This uncritical approach and lack of knowingness about the medium
seems incongruous with the level of critical expertise of the selection
panel. But most importantly, the open-submission and jury selection is an
outmoded curatorial model loathed by most curators as a token fop to
pseudo-democratic transparency. It's a model which ignores the strength of
social networks and specialist knowledge, it ignores the impossibility of
viewing thousands of artworks, and denies the opportunity to really be
transparent about the selection process at all.

Has anyone seem the presentation of the films at the Guggenheim(s) - I'm
very curious to know how they were installed and accessed. I guess many of
the works were shown in their full 'feature' length at a higher resolution?

Bestest,
Ele



On 20 October 2010 14:19, Charles Turner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Oct 18, 2010, at 8:24 AM, Sarah Cook wrote:
>
> > ... can I request that the conversation come back to the practice of
> curating?
>
> In case y'all didn't catch this:
>
> <http://ubu.com/resources/frameworks.html>
>



-- 
Ele Carpenter
Curator

Lecturer, MFA Curating, Dept of Art, Goldsmiths College,
University of London. New Cross, London SE14 6NW

m: +44 (0)7989 502 191
www.elecarpenter.org.uk
www.eleweekend.blogspot.com