The Bioscope meets YouTube

You may have noticed that we have a new address. I don’t mean the Bioscope’s physical location, which of course remains the ivy-clad fastness that is New Bioscope Towers, but rather its web address. After too long a wait, we have finally ditched the annoying ‘bioscopic’ and the WordPress.com and switched the domain to http://thebioscope.net. All old links will still take you to the site as it now is, but I hope it will now be a little clearer who we are and what we’re about. This is all part of a rolling programme of changes to the site to make sure it stays in tip-top shape.

To mark the occasion, a rather odd short video, which comes from a pair of Indian design students, Ashis Panday & Ankkit Modi, who have created a Bioscope for the YouTube age. As regulars will know, we are interested in the Bioscopes still to be found in India (and in other Asian countries, I am given to understand) which tour from town to town supplying peepshow views of film clips for children. One or two of these shows, which are managed by itinerant bioscopewallahs, feature original film projectors from the 1900s. This art work (or part of an art work) has taken YouTube videos and stitched them together in a random sequence. The video doesn’t really make it clear what is happening, but we like the concept even if the actuality may be lacking.

For earlier posts on bioscopewallahs, see Salim Baba – https://thebioscope.net/2010/09/07/salim-baba/, Prakash Travelling Cinema – https://thebioscope.net/2007/08/26/prakash-travelling-cinema/ and The Last Bioscopewallah – https://thebioscope.net/2009/09/16/the-last-bioscopewallah/.