Yesterday at an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the top videos for YouTube Play were announced. The videos comprise the ultimate YouTube playlist: a selection of the most unique, innovative, groundbreaking video work being created and distributed online during the past two years.

On October 21, the top videos selected by the YouTube Play jury will be revealed and celebrated at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The videos will be presented at the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice from October 22 to 24, 2010. The videos will also be on view on Youtube.com and Guggenheim.org.

In an earlier post, Hanne Mugaas described the near-mythical arrival in New York of the Sony Portapak. That same year, 1965, Steina and Woody Vasulka also came to roost in the Big Apple. Their presence would prove equally crucial to the development of the city’s media art scene—not only through their own work, but through their founding of experimental venue the Kitchen, which is basically where the non-CBGBs part of the '70s happened.

On Monday, September 20, the shortlist for YouTube Play was announced. These 125 videos will now be viewed by the jury, whose top 20 selections will be presented at the museum on October 21 and 22. In the following interview, we sat down with artist and juror Marilyn Minter to get her thoughts on art, life, advertising on TV, and kittens on YouTube.

The shortlist for Youtube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video was announced today. We received a wide range of videos, from experimental or abstract work and mashups, to animations, music videos, and narrative short films. The shortlisted videos include submissions from students, video artists, photographers, filmmakers, composers, video game programmers, a comedy improv group, an American Women’s Chess Champion, a Swedish rock band, a South African hip-hop group, and an Australian electronic music producer, among many others.

Long before one could post videos on the Internet, artists were utilizing the tools available within the Web itself to produce work. This type of work never had a fixed name but was sometimes called Internet Art or net.art. In this art form, the browser itself was often used and experimented with—which makes sense, as the browser is the window through which we see and experience the Web.

The Take is a blog created by the Guggenheim and inspired by YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video. On it, you’ll find writing by experts, scholars, and artists from the worlds of film, video, and Internet culture. The Take will feature discussions on digital content, the history of video art, and online video and its effects on art and life.

With YouTube Play, the Guggenheim is celebrating online video in an unprecedented global biennial. So far we have received more than 4000 videos from participants in Norway to Vietnam, but that’s not enough—we’re still waiting for your video. Submit your work from now until July 31 for a chance for it to be one of up to 20 videos selected to be shown at the Guggenheim museums in New York, Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice for three days in October. This is your chance to have your video exhibited simultaneously in not one but four major art museums worldwide.

A recent New York Times article chronicled the rise of a company called the Cheezburger Network, the enterprise behind the popular blog of humorously captioned photographs of cats, or LOLcats. Images from the blog have been flying around the Internet for the last few years, most notably one of a cat paired with the caption “I can has cheezburger?”

Artists have been working with video since the autumn of 1965. The story goes that Nam June Paik, a Korean-born artist, purchased the first Sony Portapak delivered to the U.S. in New York on October 4, 1965. On that same day, carrying the camera with him in a taxi, a traffic jam created by Pope Paul VI’s motorcade held him up. Paik videotaped the procession, and that afternoon he screened the twenty minutes of footage to friends at Café a Go-Go in Greenwich Village. Some doubt this story and it’s indisputable that Paik shared the early moments of video art with lesser-known practioners including Juan Downey, Frank Gillette, Les Levine, and Ira Schneider, as well as with Andy Warhol, who was said to screen video mere weeks before Paik’s tape was shot and shown. Whoever was first, 1965 was the year video art was born.