Art online: Iowa institutions go high-tech to display, discuss works in new ways
Art on YouTube;
Try to imagine life before television, before we looked at images and expected them to move. Imagine what it was like to spend hours looking deep into one image, instead of 24 images per second. . . .
The voice on YouTube's online video continues:
Today our brains are instructed by the code of cinema. And because that code requires us to watch passively in a sort of trance, we've gotten into this habit of relying more on the images and maybe a little bit less on ourselves. This is why when we go to museums, we end up disappointed, alienated - because something is missing. We know how to watch, but it's like we've forgotten how to see.
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To help us out, staffers at the University of Iowa Museum of Art challenged students last year to create short videos about various works in the collection. In the YouTube series quoted above, Eula Biss and John Bresland riff on an ivory figurine from the Congo, a blurry red Mark Rothko, a pudgy statue swiped from a Big Boy burger joint, and more. With a few simple tricks from "the code of cinema," the videos bring the artwork to life more than a standard printed explanation ever could.
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