Saturday, February 25, 2006

Vtape does not understand

Howdy!

I read someplace that Vtape (a thing-y about Canadian Video Art) was going to launch today. So I went to take a gander. It is horrific. A text based website for the winner's of the Bell Canada Award for Video Art they present excerpts from a bunch of videos.

1991 winners Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour get 4:46 min. excerpt from the 19:00 min. original and 5:57 min. excerpt from the 77:00 min. original. Paul Wong won it in 1992, he gets a 5:06 min. excerpt from the 89:00 min. original. I'm not slogging through the rest of the site in order to give you a list of how long the excerpts are.

If Vtape gets "on-going support from The Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council" then why can't they stop with charging for access to the videos? Or if they get significant cash from the government, why do they need at least another $67,870 in order to create a horrible website that doesn't help further the education of anybody about Canadian Video Art (can you imagine learning Moby Dick only by reading the Coles Notes version?).

If everybody and their mother can upload videos and art videos and bad videos to Google (and other places) for free



And, heck even embed them here, then why isn't vTape? And what cost so gosh darn much?

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