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."

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.

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.

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.

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