YouTube Meetup in NYC Tomorrow

In what is an apparent attempt to convert Washington Square Park into a techno-hippie love-in of Haight-Ashbury proportions, hundreds (maybe thousands?) of video geeks will descend tomorrow into Greenwich Village, handycams in hand, for the first-ever New York YouTube Meetup.

If you keep tabs on the vid zeitgeist then you know the event — the latest such meetup, after a similar geeky bacchanalia in San Francisco earlier this year — from this video by Happy Slip, which has received over 2.6 million views since June 9 and reached as high as number 6 on the vidmeter index. Or maybe you heard of the meetup from this video. Or this video. Or this one. No shortage here. Really. I can keep going. See?

Given the video-centricity of the meetup, I suppose there’s no irony that the party will make Washington Square Park at once the most surveilled location in New York City by both amateur YouTubers and the NYPD. So that participatory panopticon will ensure that there is either no crime whatsoever on Saturday or, with so many cameras watching the same thing, create a parallax of Primer proportions.Among Saturday’s events: One gorilla film-making session, the naming of which would surely cause a younger Michael Shamberg to titter with glee, or cause today’s Mark Dery to roll his eyes in disbelief. Truly. That’s one tame gorilla you got there, Goodall.

But I kid. There’s not much transgressive left in video, Saturday promises to be good times, and if you can’t make it there’s always Live Earth on MSN. Otherwise, I’ll be at Washington Square, too. Let’s chat.