Russell Smith (photo by Fred Lum)
Ryeberg is grateful for Russell Smith’s wonderful piece in the Arts section of today’s Globe and Mail: “Ryeberg.com’s gateway to YouTube“: A Canadian’s YouTube ‘curators’ are creating a new form.”
Russell describes the what and why of the site:
“A Canadian project has set out to provide marked doorways into the labyrinth, by inviting prominent writers from around the world to curate their own galleries of free Internet videos… The resulting essays are fascinating in two major ways: (1) they guide us to pieces either beautiful or curious that were probably unknown to us and (2) they are personal essays about their authors. So they illuminate both the art and the critic.”
Particularly pleasing is the succinct way Russell distinguishes Ryeberg from other video aggregators: “Ryeberg’s content is organized by curator, not by theme, which turns the focus onto the writers rather than the videos.”
Russell then closes the article with customary flair and skill, evoking both the novelty of the website and its unmistakable place within the spirit and practices of the age.
“We have had illustrated lectures – in the form of slide shows or television documentaries – for many years. But static text embedded with moving pictures, whose viewing can be controlled by a solitary reader, is a relatively new form. It’s private, individual reading rather than a group activity. And it represents an engagement with the world of floating visual flashes that is more active than passive. I suspect we will be seeing more of it.”
Ryeberg is proud to be playing a small part in the battle against passivity.
