Gene Youngblood
Expanded Cinema
Author(s) Gene Youngblood
Format paperback book
Year 2020 (Original: 1970)
Language(s) English
Pages 449 pages
Description
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 account of the 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 testament to the rise of experimental cinema and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this in-depth 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," "synaesthesia and kinesthesia," and "the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis." Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Production methods are meticulously described, including through interviews with artists and technologists of the time, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring introduction by celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a veritable gem of countercultural thought in itself—places Youngblood's radical observations in global perspective.
Providing unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema illuminates a chapter of counterculture history that, half a century later, is still not fully represented in art history archives. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer areas of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to anyone interested in the technologies reshaping the nature of human communication.