Louisiana Channel is a non-profit web-TV channel based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark. The Louisiana Channel team produces videos about art and culture on an ongoing basis, and new videos are posted on the site http://channel.louisiana.dk every week.
By the end of the first year, 28 November 2013, Louisiana Channel had published 130 videos featuring international artists, film makers, photographers, musicians, designers, architects and writers. The videos are free for everyone to share.
Louisiana Channel's aim is international and about half of the views come from English speaking countries. The videos are generally artist portraits, talks, interviews, short documentaries or recordings of events around the world.
Aside from sharing videos on the website, Louisiana Channel can also be found on Vimeo and YouTube.
Artists
Louisiana Channel currently has six categories: Art, Literature, Music, Design, Architecture and Most popular. The videos cover a variety of subjects - from singer-songwriter and poet Patti Smith's first encounters with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to artist David Hockney's thoughts on photography and Photoshop. Another popular video is the interview with Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, who offers advice to young artists and demonstrates how to turn an everyday moment into an extraordinary experience.
In general, the videos feature a variety of personalities - for example David Byrne, Anne Carson, Thomas Demand, Tara Donovan, Kerstin Ekman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Siri Hustvedt, Yayoi Kusama, Leigh Ledare, Jonathan Meese, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Anri Sala, Gary Shteyngart, Henrik Vibskov, Bill Viola and Ai Weiwei.
1st Year
Launched 28 November 2012, Louisiana Channel reached one million video views the first year. Patti Smith: Advice to the young is the most watched video, having gone viral when the actress Emma Watson tweeted the link to her six million followers. The video was seen by more than 50.000 people the following 24 hours. Yoko Ono: Celebrating her 80th birthday in Berlin is the second most viewed video, and the most discussed one, Yoko Ono's performance frequently being both criticized and defended on YouTube.
The Louisiana Channel videos are popular with bloggers and communities with special interests. Various photographic networks have shared David Hockney: Photoshop is boring, while Snöhetta: Memories of architectural landscapes and Superflex: A cool urban space were shared by international online magazines such as Archdaily. Günter Grass: Facebook is shit became very popular in the German newspapers as well as on Facebook itself, where many users defended the social network site. While Louisiana Channel is present on Twitter and Instagram, much of the traffic to the site comes from Louisiana Channel's Facebook page.
Sharing art & culture
Louisiana Channel contributes to the permanent development of the museum as a cultural platform in order to enhance the importance of art and culture. Like Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, it is Louisiana Channel's role to stimulate discussions on society through the insights of art and the artists.
Although the Louisiana Channel videos are not about Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the production is based on the know-how and network of the museum, and has adapted the notion of hot and cold exhibitions for the on-line media â€" mixing the popular and the narrow - the well known artists with lesser known ones. The focus is on producing quality, sharing art, creating personal, intimate portraits and communicating what the artists have to say.
Louisiana Channel's content is free and intended for sharing. To increase accessibility Louisiana Channel currently collaborates with sites such as ArtBabble, making videos on art more accessible to educators - and with Amara - translating and subtitling videos via crowd sourcing. Louisiana Channels videos are currently being translated to various languages, such as Chinese, Polish, German, Russian, Italian and Greek, and some videos are already available with subtitles on YouTube.
The Louisiana Channel trailer can be seen via this link.
References
- Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents Louisiana Channel
- An introduction to Louisiana Channel by Huffington Post.
- Nordea-fonden explains their support to Louisiana Channel. (in Danish)
- KOPENHAGEN NEWS article on Louisiana Channel (in Danish)
- KUNSTEN NU article on Louisiana Channel (in Danish)
- Article on the launch of Louisiana Channel by DR - Danmarks Radio. (in Danish)
- Article on the launch of Louisiana Channel by Politiken (in Danish)
External references
- Louisiana Channel homepage
- Louisiana Channel on Vimeo
- Louisiana Channel on YouTube
- Louisiana Channel on Twitter
- Louisiana Channel on Facebook
- Louisiana Channel on LinkedIn