“YouTube Play - A Biennial of Creative Video” is a joint initiative of YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum. The concept behind the biennial was to seek out the most exciting and innovative online videos of the past two years. An international competition was held in June and July 2010. By the application deadline of 31 July the channel had been called up nearly seven million times.

During and after the competition, the Guggenheim featured some 200 submissions on the biennial’s Play channel. As second step, a jury of prominent figures is choosing the best videos from the shortlist. Jury members are: Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Darren Aronofsky, Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Nancy Spector as chair.

The jury will select up to 20 videos, which will then be presented to the public not only on YouTube but also at the Guggenheim New York as part of a special event on 21 October, and during the week after at the Guggenheim Museums in Berlin, Bilbao and Venice.

URL: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact/participate/youtube-play

This October, an international animated film festival will take place again in Bulgaria after a long caesura. Nicknamed the “Golden Kuker”, the festival is endeavouring to pick up the tradition inaugurated by the World Animated Film Festival in Varna, which was last held in 1989. The new festival will take place in the capital of Sofia.

Evidently, the former co-organizers of the festival in Varna, the Bulgarian ASIFA association, feel left out. ASIFA complains that the kuker symbol has been appropriated without permission by a “suspicious organization”, underscoring the fact that the new festival has nothing to do with the original.

The new festival is being put on from 13 to 17 October by the Bulgarian Association of Independent Cartoon Animation Artists at the National Palace of Culture.

A “kuker” incidentally is a masked figure thought to ward off evil spirits – a tradition in south-western Bulgaria that can be traced back to Thracian tribal rituals.

Organizer: http://www.baicaa.org/
ASIFA: http://www.asifa.net/

Artycok was founded in 2005 by the Art Academy of Prague (AVU) as a non-commercial Internet TV platform. Since then, Artycok has been busy collecting and archiving reports on exhibition openings and interviews with artists and curators, which it then publicizes on its own website. A special focus is providing information and sparking discussion on important shows, projects and artists who receive little or no attention from the mainstream media. In 2008 a section on time-based media art was added.

From May 2010 to April 2012 Artycok will implement the European-Commission-funded project “open archive”. The idea is for Artycok to extend its operations to other European countries, in particular Slovakia, Serbia and Slovenia. Partners in Budapest, Warsaw, Krakow, Chisinau, London and Berlin are involved. The project is designed to promote communication on the arts scene and foster intercultural dialogue. As an archive of contemporary art, Artycok is in particular a good information resource for the educational field.

The “Audiovisual” section of the website includes artistic films and videos. Every work listed includes an explanation by the artist and an option to enter a comment. Films can be streamed in full length in HD quality. Some titles can also be downloaded.

The videos and photographs of exhibitions, art projects and lectures are licensed under Creative Commons (cc) and are hence available to anyone for non-commercial use. The platform is in three languages (f, cz, en).

URL: http://artycok.tv/