On August 30th, 2012 over 10,000 people gathered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the first Internet Cat Video Festival (#catvidfest). What began as a social experiment testing the boundaries of online communities and crowd-sourcing content resulted in attention from local, national, and international audiences and press and raised public debate around the role of museums in an internet culture. Fractious questions were raised about the relevancy or ridiculousness of the event and the role of the curator in a crowd-sourced environment. Using #catvidfest as a case study, we will question what it means for a museum to reflect contemporary culture in the era of YouTube, explore the challenges traditional institutions face engaging online audiences and share what we learned from transforming a solitary online viewing experience into a real world social event. This session will include cat videos.
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