YouTube Play: the shortlist

The Guggenheim and YouTube, in collaboration with HP and Intel, announced today the shortlist for YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video. Selected from more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, the 125 shortlisted videos can now be seen on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play and at kiosks in the Guggenheim museums in New York City, Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice.

The YouTube Play shortlist videos include submissions from students, video artists, photographers, filmmakers, composers, video game programmers, an American Women’s Chess Champion, a comedy improv group, a Swedish rock band, a South African hip-hop group, and an Australian electronic music producer.

Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, notes, “The shortlist presents a rich sampling of the best creative video found on YouTube and is representative of the various stylistic and conceptual genres specific to this broad, ever-expanding platform. The selection is diverse in technique, subject matter, geography, and professional status, which reflects the increasing accessibility of new media technologies around the world. We believe the shortlist reveals the abundance of creative energy this project evoked.”

The 125 shortlisted videos were chosen by the Guggenheim curatorial team and have been presented to the YouTube Play jury for consideration. The jury of eleven luminaries includes: musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson; musical artists Animal Collective; visual artists Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, and Takashi Murakami; artists and filmmakers Darren Aronofsky, Shirin Neshat, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with the Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.

YouTube Play juror and visual artist Takashi Murakami states, “In both the global art world and beyond, the speed at which information technology is developing is accelerating at an astounding rate. These innovations have brought with them drastic changes in both the form and dissemination of artistic expression. In the past several years, not a day passes without me watching something on YouTube. YouTube is a medium to communicate with the world at large and we artists can no longer call ourselves artists merely by discovering something special and presenting it to the public alone. In that way, YouTube has incited a revolution.”

The jury will now select up to 20 of their top choices to be revealed and presented at a special YouTube Play event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21. The final videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public from October 22 through 24 in the Tower 2 gallery of the museum, and available to a worldwide audience on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play.

YouTube Play is one of several collaborative efforts by the video-sharing Web site to push the boundaries of music, film, and now art. YouTube Symphony Orchestra and the film project Life in a Day are examples of the convergence of online video with more traditional art forms. To find out more, please visit youtube.com/play.