From Talkies to Video as Art

Sound technicians setting up the turn-table and amplifiers for the first "talkies" in Australia, 1927-1928
Originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection

What we call movies today were once (1927) referred to as "Talkies", silent films that had sound. What's commonly known is that Talkies put a lot of silent film stars out of business, because their talking voices were weak or out of line with thier appearence, e.g., a big man talking in a hight pitched voice.

These days, over 75 years later, "talkies" are called films or "videos". Films require a bulkie peice of engineering that sits on ones shoulder, but videos can be created on hand held devices, such as cell phones, and uploaded on the WEB at sites like YouTube.

The Guggenheim Musem in New York has taken the video one step further. They have a contest for people who create "artistic" videos. The best of artistic videos they receive will be feature in . . . the Guggenheim Museum. But what 's really amazingh about this project is the "artsy" video that the museum put out to entice people to send in a video. Click on the little cluster of grey and black squares to the right. It's the Delicious web site symbol and it will take you to the site where my favorite web pages and videos are stored.  Once there, click on the title YOU TUBE PLAY, and enjoy one of the most creative videos I've ever seen.  Or you can just save the visit to my page on Delicious for another time and click here, http://www.youtube.com/playbiennial to see the video.