YouTube Play Creative Video Competition Draws 23,000 Entries


Photo: YouTube Play
A scene from the video "Luis" by Niles Atallah, Joaquin Coci?a Varas and Cristobal Leon

DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to American Mosaic in VOA Special English.

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I'm Doug Johnson.

Today, we listen to "Wake Up," a new album from John Legend and the Roots.

And we answer a question about a famous Tennessee Williams play.

But first, we tell about YouTube videos appearing at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Europe.

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YouTube at the Guggenheim

The video sharing website, YouTube, was created in two thousand five and became an overnight success. Google bought YouTube for more than one billion six hundred thousand dollars the following year. In May, YouTube announced that two billion videos were watched each day.

In June, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City announced it would hold a competition among YouTube videos. Now, the judges have chosen the top one hundred twenty-five videos. Mario Ritter has more.

MARIO RITTER: The Guggenheim and YouTube launched the competition called "YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video." The information technology companies HP and Intel are supporting the event. Twenty-three thousand videos entered the competition. They represented ninety-one countries and every possible style of moviemaking.

The rules of the competition were few. Videomakers had to be eighteen years or older. They could enter only one video. It had to be no more than ten minutes long. Any language, subject, sound and style were considered.

Eleven people are judging the videos. They include artists, musicians and filmmakers. Laurie Anderson is all three. She says all her art starts with a story. So she looks for a story as she judges the videos.

Other judges include the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, the band Animal Collective and artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.

New Jersey artist Dahlia Elsayed's video is one of the finalists. She used the camera in her computer to record herself describing her daily food desires for one month. The video is simple, short and interesting.

A frightening but beautiful video came from Chile. The video by Niles Atallah, Joaquin Coci?a Varas and Cristobal Leon is called "Luis." It is an animated ghostly story of a tense, angry boy. It is very dark but impossible to stop watching.

"Mars to Jupiter" is a video from Canada by Sterling Pache. It is about a survivor of the nineteen ninety-four genocide in Rwanda. The video explores how her past still haunts her.