The very exciting Guggenheim Museum/YouTube collaborative competition – YouTube Play – is on the hunt for the world’s most creative videos. As we reported last month, YouTube Play was conceived to discover and showcase the most exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Open to the global online community, the competition is accepting submissions now through July 31st.

And now the competition’s all-star and eclectic jury from the worlds of art, design, film, and music has been announced. The impressive dream-team panel includes Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Darren Aronofsky, Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

According to jury chair Nancy Spector:

“We will be looking for work that will test, elevate, and experiment with video as it is manifest online. We are less interested in what’s ‘now’ than in what’s next.” YouTube Play is open to students and amateur video makers, artists, and creative professionals. Submissions may include animation, motion graphics, narrative, nonnarrative, documentary, and music videos. The jury will review a short list of up to two hundred video works that have been prescreened by the Guggenheim from the pool of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and uploaded to youtube.com/play. From the short list, the jury will select up to twenty that they deem the most creative and inspiring, regardless of genre, technique, or budget. The short-listed videos will be on the YouTube Play channel (youtube.com/play) beginning in September 2010.

To learn more, visit YouTube.com/Play.

For this Thursday, in honor of the Guggenheim Museum‘s 50th Anniversary, the band Animal Collective has collaborated with experimental visual artist Danny Perez on a site-specific performance piece that will transform the museum’s rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment.

Tickets are on sale now (details below) for the Thursday, March 4th performances. The new collaborative work, entitled “Transverse Temporal Gyrus,” will feature original recorded music along with video projections, costumes, and props, rendering the band members and performers into intense, visual abstractions. The performance will debut in conjunction with the Guggenheim’s current exhibit, “Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum” and in the context of its “Tino Sehgal” exhibit (for which the entire Guggenheim rotunda is cleared of art objects for the first time in the museum’s history).

Left: Animal Collective. Photo by: Adriano Fagundes. Right: Danny Perez. Photo by: Kathy Sheehan

Two performances will run continuously – one from 4:30 to 7:30 pm and a second from 9 pm to midnight – and guests are invited to wander the museum rotunda and ramps to fully immerse themselves in the experience.

Venue: Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
Date: Thursday, March 4, 2010
Tickets: $25 members; $30 non-members
General admission, all ages
Limited capacity; advance online ticket sales only available at:
guggenheim.org/animal-collective

*Image courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum.