Internet video: Museums

About a year ago I was talking with an ex-museum-director friend about video art and the internets. He told me that he was surprised that more video artists hadn't taken advantage of the internet as a way of getting their work seen. "I keep waiting for video art to pop up on iTunes," he said. "And I check at least once a week."

Ever since that conversation I've been keeping an eye on sites such as Google Video and YouTube for any sign that new media artists are looking for broader audiences via the web. I haven't found much -- but that could also be because I don't know where to look. (Anyone know of a good blog with this stuff?) So let's start with what two museums are doing:

The Museum of Modern Art has recently started a YouTube channel called MoMAvideos. Given the museum's partnership with Creative Time on Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers, two 'trailers' for Aitken's MoMA projections are the channel's first programming -- and they're well worth a look. (The trailers are also on Google Video, and MoMA has an Aitken site on moma.org.)

So far the museum doesn't have any plans to post works from its collection on YouTube, to commission work that would be shown there, or to launch a video art 'exhibition' on YouTube... but that's not to say those things won't happen in the future, I'm told.

One reason to expect MoMA to be among the first to explore online possibilities: MoMA recently created a Department of Media, and put curator Klaus Biesenbach in charge of it. That means there's a place in MoMA's hierarchy to explore outside-the-box ideas such as this. For example: MoMA may post video of Aitken's sleepwalkers as projected on its buildings once the exhibition starts on Jan. 16. After all, dozens of New Yorkers will probably post their own homemade sleepwalkers vids on YouTube, so why shouldn't the museum do so itself? (That's a MoMA-distributed rendering of sleepwalkers at right.)

Another benefit of using a YouTube channel instead of putting this all on the museum's own website: It costs MoMA virtually nothing to put video on YouTube. If MoMA had to host the video and pay for the bandwidth, who knows how much that could cost.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art also has a YouTube channel (It's My Art) and it seems to be experimenting with how to use it. So far it's posting videos that it has produced in-house, such as a conversation with Nigerian artist Prince Twins Seven-Seven and a five-minute documentary on one collector's contributions to the museum in the 1930s and '40s.

Next on MAN: New media art on YouTube, usually guerilla-style.

Related: Doug Aitken's studio. Greg Allen with foreshadowing.