Vimeo Festival Preview: An Interview With One Of The “Captured” Judges

We’ve been really impressed with the line-up for the upcoming Vimeo Festival & Awards, taking place in NYC on October 8th & 9th. They’ve got an all-star cast of judges with the likes of David Lynch, Morgan Spurlock, Lawrence Lessig and M.I.A., many of whom will also be featured speakers in the festival portion, which is jam packed with timely and provocative panels and workshops.

But as stimulating as their festival programming may be, what we’re most interested in (aside from seeing D. Lynch in the flesh, of course) is the abundance of truly fantastic video works on display. Where Vimeo differentiates itself from other video platforms is in the quality of artists its been able to attract with its slick HD video player. We’re thinking that’s why their recently announced Shortlist and Finalists put the Guggenheim’s YouTube Play Shortlist to shame.

Another reason we’re totally crushing on the Vimeo dudes is because they have their fingers on the pulse of how digital media is changing and are addressing that in their awards categories. One of the strangest categories in the mix is the “Captured” category, which is focused on “videos that capture an artistic expression or performance.” The importance of documenting artwork, particularly work that is transient or immaterial in nature, such as performance art or new media art, is a fairly new practice, one that has been amplified by the proliferation of video tools and distribution channels in recent years.

We spoke with one of the judges of the category, cultural researcher, writer and curator, José Luis de Vicente, to find out more about what this unusual body of work is all about, and how the hell he went about judging it.

You are judging a new and very interesting category. How would you describe the work in the “Captured” category?
To me, there was something very interesting about this category because it was reflecting how the way a certain community is distributing their work and showcasing it to the world is very much connected to contexts like these online video platforms. “Captured” is about any kind of work that was happening in space—whether in public space or in the context of a gallery, whether it’s performance, or installation, or happening—but [the work] was not conceived as video from the beginning. It is a documentation of a work.

To me, it’s kind of funny because I have been in many juries before and one thing that happens in art juries is that sometimes you wonder if you’re judging the artist, the piece, or the quality of the documentation. When you’re looking at performance-based work or installation-based work, are you looking at the merit of the work itself, or how well it’s being portrayed? Because some people are incredibly good at selling their project, and other people not at all. And sometimes you feel, hey maybe this is a little unfair, but at the same time, as a judge, the documentation is the only thing you have because obviously you cannot go gallery by gallery, country to country, looking at every single project that has been submitted. So here there was this idea that was very interesting, which was a category exclusively about how do you capture and how do you communicate work that hasn’t been conceived for video, but where video is the translating language in a way, it’s what carries out the message.

Since it’s an entirely new category with no set standard, what sort of criteria were you using to judge submissions? What were you looking for?
I’m not exactly sure, you know? I think in the end it really came down to how engaging we were finding it, how intriguing. Obviously there were a lot of trends, for instance, one of the big trends this year was projection mapping projects, big scale projects on buildings or dynamic sculptures and things like that. Once you’ve seen 15 projects like that, you start to think, ok, what is it really that stands out on top of all of these? Then also, there were very different kinds of work—works that were from the context of innovation and experimental art, very much connected to the new media scene in a way, but in other cases it was people using video to capture artistic impression in a much more traditional sense, things like somebody recording the whole process of painting a Warhol painting or some kind of Japanese process for sculpting fruit. How do we compare these with big massive media projects when they exist on different grounds and they cannot really compare one with the other. So in the end, I think what we were looking for was engagement and surprise. You wanted to be surprised.

Did you find that you were gravitating more towards work that was new media, experimenting with technology in interesting ways, as opposed to something more traditional?
Obviously, most of the submissions were coming from work done in the new media scene. Which was both a positive quality and a problem in the sense that you can see how your perception gets flattened out as many ideas are released in one area again and again. Sometimes though, and I think those were the most surprising ones, is what you could find—interesting connections, things you wouldn’t expect. Like say, new media sculpture focused on technological processes and low-tech, almost handicraft type of approaches. For instance, taking the newest consumer gadget that you can think of—things like an iPhone or an iPad—and then combining it with low-tech accessible technology so that you are getting some sort of almost 19th century wonder device. Something that is in a way from the future and from the past at the same time. And then you find this tension there, like there is really about 200 years worth of media history encapsulated in this strange device.

In your own work, you are a cultural researcher? What exactly does that mean? And what is your research focused on?
I have problems calling what I do or what other people do as “curation” because I think that what curators do in the context of an art exhibition is very well defined. Other people call themselves “cultural producers” but I like to put the emphasis on research because I think research as a form of practice is not only very valid, but is what we should be focusing on right now. I think the value of creating a model of research that happens in the context of cultural institutions and that takes the advantage of cultural institutions over academic institutions is very important. More and more research could happen and should happen in the open not behind closed doors. It should happen closer to the audience and engage the audience as participants in “real-time experiments,” in creating trans-disciplinary research where artists, scientists, and technologists never work alone but [in a setting where] a real engagement of discussion among all of them can happen. So I think there is a change happening right now of creating new kinds of cultural institutions that are not defined by presenting outside research but really doing some kind of open-ended participatory interdisciplinary model of research.