Stan VanDerBeek


Book Description

American independent filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was one of the first to extend film projection into multimedia spectacle and to embrace video and computer technology: a supreme instance of what critic Gene Youngblood dubbed "Expanded Cinema."




The Experience Machine


Book Description

An argument that the collaborative multimedia projects produced by Stan VanDerBeek in the 1960s and 1970s anticipate contemporary new media and participatory art practices. In 1965, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) unveiled his Movie-Drome, made from the repurposed top of a grain silo. VanDerBeek envisioned Movie-Drome as the prototype for a communications system—a global network of Movie-Dromes linked to orbiting satellites that would store and transmit images. With networked two-way communication, Movie-Dromes were meant to ameliorate technology's alienating impulse. In The Experience Machine, Gloria Sutton views VanDerBeek—known mostly for his experimental animated films—as a visual artist committed to the radical aesthetic sensibilities he developed during his studies at Black Mountain College. She argues that VanDerBeek's collaborative multimedia projects of the 1960s and 1970s (sometimes characterized as “Expanded Cinema”), with their emphases on transparency of process and audience engagement, anticipate contemporary art's new media, installation, and participatory practices. VanDerBeek saw Movie-Drome not as pure cinema but as a communication tool, an “experience machine.” In her close reading of the work, Sutton argues that Movie-Drome can be understood as a programmable interface. She describes the immersive experience of Movie-Drome, which emphasized multi-sensory experience over the visual; display strategies deployed in the work; the Poemfield computer-generated short films; and VanDerBeek's interest, unique for the time, in telecommunications and computer processing as a future model for art production. Sutton argues that visual art as a direct form of communication is a feedback mechanism, which turns on a set of relations, not a technology.




Expanded Cinema


Book Description

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.




Means, Material, Wheeeeels, Superimposition, Masks, Body/building, Studio, Time, Violence, Eyes, Language, Home


Book Description

This book, which accompanied a groundbreaking exhibition, presents a multilayered picture of influence and experimentation between a family of artists. A few years before his death in 1984, the conceptual artist Stan VanDerBeek recalled a dream he had of the ideal exhibition space, which he playfully referred to as 'Amazement Park'. Taking inspiration from that dream, this project combines artwork by the influential filmmaker and artist with work by his daughter, Sara, and son, Johannes, both contemporary artists. This unique book captures the ensuing exhibition: a studio-like space that changed every month for one year and featured works by all three artists. The drawings, photographs, video, and sculpture that revolved in and out of the exhibition reflect the artists' common interest in recombination and collage, ephemeral materials, and architectural forms. AUTHOR: Ian Berry is Associate Director and The Susan Rabinowitz Malloy Curator of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Anne Ellegood is Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.




Entangled


Book Description

How technologies, from the mechanical to the computational, have transformed artistic performance practices.




Between the Black Box and the White Cube


Book Description

Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art. Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.




The Collected Writings of Takahiko Iimura


Book Description

"Taka iimura has been making films since the early 1960s. His work has gone through a series of relatively clear, consistent developments: from 1962 to 1968, iimura was largely involved with surreal imagery, with eroticism, and with social criticism; from 1968 through 1971, he continued to use photographic imagery, but worked with it in increasingly formal ways; from 1972 until 1978, he devoted himself very largely to a series of minimalist explorations of time and space. During the years since, iimura has been more fully involved with video than with film." --Scott MacDonald "Although Taka was and continues to be an active part of the New York avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence, pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema's minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else." -- Jonas Mekas




The Channeled Image


Book Description

A fascinating look at artistic experiments with televisual forms. Following the integration of television into the fabric of American life in the 1950s, experimental artists of the 1960s began to appropriate this novel medium toward new aesthetic and political ends. As Erica Levin details in The Channeled Image, groundbreaking artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini developed a new formal language that foregrounded television’s mediation of a social order defined by the interests of the state, capital, and cultural elites. The resulting works introduced immersive projection environments, live screening events, videographic distortion, and televised happenings, among other forms. For Levin, “the channeled image” names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images. This formal experimentation influenced new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen projections, or in some cases, experimental work produced for broadcast. Above all, this book asks how artistic experimentation with televisual forms was shaped by events that challenged television broadcasters’ claims to authority, events that set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated in the future.




Cinema Expanded


Book Description

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.




The Exploding Eye


Book Description

The Exploding Eye explores the work of lesser-known American experimental filmmakers whose work has been excluded from the dominant film canon. Although the works of such artists as Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, and Maya Deren are well-known to the contemporary scholar of independent cinema, there is an entire body of work created in the American experimental cinema that has been overlooked, work of considerable beauty and influence that was enthusiastically received when first released and that is still available for viewing today, awaiting long-overdue rediscovery. Featuring more than seventy rare stills and complete information on the films and filmmakers covered, The Exploding Eye offers a fresh vision of American experimental film for critics, scholars, and the general reader.