More than 5,000 cat lovers are expected
to descend on Oakland's Uptown district on May 11, when the city hosts the Bay
Area premiere of the Internet Cat Video Festival.
Eighty videos of cats doing what
they do best - being cute – will be projected in high definition by a
15,000-lumen projector onto the Great Wall of Oakland, a giant100-foot-by-100-foot
wall on West Grand Avenue between Broadway and Valley Street.
"There's something going on in
our culture were cats are really hot right now," says Issabella Shields,
the Great Wall's Executive Director. "Instead of watching cat videos secretly
in your cubicle by yourself and feeling guilty for wasting time at work, this
is your chance to watch them outdoors with your friends."
Shields expects the festival to
draw a diverse audience, including "Internet addicts, families who have
cats of their own, and hipsters who think cat videos are ironic."
The festival, which began last year
at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will feature 80 of the most popular felines
on the Web, including the Surprised Kitten, Henri the Existential Cat, and
Dusty the Klepto Kitty, whose larcenous ways earned him an appearance on The
Late Show With David Letterman.
"They flew us back to New York
for the show," says Dusty's owner, Jean Chu of San Mateo. "Dusty flew
business class; I flew coach."
Dusty will make a personal
appearance at the festival together with some of his ill-gotten gains, which
include 16 car wash mitts, seven sponges, 213 dish towels, seven wash
cloths, five towels, 18 shoes, 73 socks, 100 gloves, one pair of mittens, three
aprons, 40 balls, four pairs of underwear, one dog collar, six rubber toys, one
blanket, three leg warmers, two Frisbees, one golf club head cover, one safety
mask, two mesh bags, one bag of water balloons, one pair of pajama pants and
eight bathing suits.
The videos, which
begin at sundown, will be preceded by a festival starting at 3 p.m. that will
include live bands playing cat-themed music, an "arts and cats" area
featuring cat-themed works by local artisans, local food trucks, and animal
rescue groups with cats and kittens available for adoption.
As the sun sets,
the Great Wall's artist-in-residence group, Bandaloop, will perform a
cat-themed aerial duet on the Great Wall, followed by the videos themselves.
Tickets to the
festival are available at oaklandvidfest.eventbrite.com. Admission is $10 for
adults; $5 for youths 16 and under. A limited number of VIP tickets, entitling
the bearer to a beach chair in the front row, will be sold for $75.
In addition, the
Oakland Museum – renamed Mew-seum for the occasion - will preview the videos on
May 10, the night before the festival. Tickets are $25 and can be obtained at
omcacatvidscreening.eventbrite.com. The preview will include a panel headed by
Scott Stulen, Project Director of the Walker Art Center, the man who came up
with the idea of a cat video festival in the first place.
"We put a
press release on our blog with a call for nominations," he says. "Within
two hours it had gone viral, and we ended up with more than 10,000 videos,
which we narrowed down to 80."
They were
inundated by requests for media credentials from all over the world, but Stulin
was still unprepared for the number of peoples who turned out.
"We thought
maybe a couple of dozen people would come out, get a case of beer, and watch
some cat videos. But they just kept coming and coming and coming, to the point
where it shut down the freeways. People were spilling out on the streets and
onto the neighbors' lawns. It was the most attended, most media-covered event
in the 75 years of the Walker Art Center."
Any downside?
"Only one:
having to deal with the cats' agents. Yes, several of the videos have
agents."
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