Luis Jimenez video on American Art's ArtBabble Page
Film and video began as linear, storytelling media: you sat down, watched a movie through, and then the experience was over. Maybe if you were watching with an interested companion or a class, you got some conversation going afterward, but that was about as interactive as it got. Then video became social media: we were able to digitize and share videos, allowing us to comment on them or list them as favorites on YouTube.
ArtBabble, the online art video service from the Indianapolis Museum of Art that launched today, has raised the bar even higher, and gives the museum incredible new tools for presenting contemporary artists’ ever-growing repertoire of stylistic and narrative innovations online.
On ArtBabble you can watch artist interviews and art videos from an increasing number of museums in a quality that shows the art to best advantage, and without any frustrating download or lag time. But even better, the videos can include ‘notes’—links to related videos, documents, images, or Web sites—at the exact points or 'chapters' in the timeline where you want that additional context. So suddenly, you can surf videos in a nonlinear way and view them alongside a whole set of related content. Similarly, you can add your comments to the timeline, pinpointing the scene or even the frame you want to discuss. It also allows you to favorite and share videos with the wider art community. ArtBabble is video for the 2.0 generation.
John Hanhardt, American Art’s curator for film and media, recently noted that the moving image—and its immediate accessibility—is rewriting the history of twentieth century art. Indeed, we can really only grasp the changes our media-saturated world is undergoing by understanding the impact of the moving image on them.
The challenge for museums is to accommodate and represent these multimedia arts, and ArtBabble is an important new platform for bringing art video to a broader online public. So grab your surfboard and dive in! Videos from American Art that you can now see on ArtBabble include interviews with artists:
And there are many more to come, so keep checking back and let us know what you think!
