Overview

"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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Gene Youngblood ,  R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
Imprint:   Fordham University Press
ISBN:  

9780823287420

ISBN 10:   0823287424
Pages:   464
Publication Date:   03 March 2020
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations | ix Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition | xiii Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller | 15 Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology by R. Buckminster Fuller | 37 Preface | 41 Part One: The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment | 45 Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Era | 50 The Intermedia Network as Nature | 54 Popular Culture and the Noosphere | 57 Art, Entertainment, Entropy | 59 Retrospective Man and the Human Condition | 66 The Artist as Design Scientist | 70 Part Two: Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama | 75 Global Closed Circuit: The Earth as Software | 78 Synaesthetic Synthesis: Simultaneous Perception of Harmonic Opposites | 81 Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage | 84 Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness | 92 Synaesthetics as Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience | 97 Mythipoeiai: The End of Fiction | 106 Synaesthetics and Synergy | 109 Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism | 112 Synaesthetic Cinema and Extra-Objective Reality | 122 Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age | 128 Part Three: Toward Cosmic Consciousness | 135 2001: The New Nostalgia | 139 The Stargate Corridor | 151 The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson | 157 Part Four: Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films | 179 The Technosphere: Man/Machine Symbiosis | 180 The Human Bio-Computer and His Electronic Brainchild | 183 Hardware and Software | 185 The Aesthetic Machine | 189 Cybernetic Cinema | 194 Computer Films | 207 Part Five: Television as a Creative Medium | 257 The Videosphere | 260 Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics | 265 Synaesthetic Videotapes | 281 Videographic Cinema | 317 Closed-Circuit Television and Teledynamic Environments | 337 Part Six: Intermedia | 345 The Artist as Ecologist | 346 World Expositions and Nonordinary Reality | 352 Cerebrum: Intermedia and the Human Sensorium | 359 Intermedia Theatre | 365 Multiple-Projection Environments | 387 Part Seven: Holographic Cinema: A New World | 399 Wave-Front Reconstruction: Lensless Photography | 400 Dr. Alex Jacobson: Holography in Motion | 404 Limitations of Holographic Cinema | 407 Projecting Holographic Movies | 411 The Kinoform: Computer-Generated Holographic Movies | 414 Technoanarchy: The Open Empire | 415 Selected Bibliography | 421 Index | 427

Reviews

Expanded Cinema defined the world of what is now known as media arts. -- Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar Expanded Cinema is one of the most prescient books written about our modern age. -- Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art Youngblood's Expanded Cinema stands as one of the classics of the interdisciplinary field that studies media, art, and science. -- Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art Gene Youngblood is the medium's Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote our Declaration of Independence, who marked out a vision of media and democracy that remains an invaluable guide to media culture and a document of extraordinary vision and prophecy. -- Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Gene Youngblood didn't just capture the zeitgeist of his generation. He was the zeitgeist of his generation. -- Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy I've never had an experience with a book like I had with Expanded Cinema. Gene Youngblood saw something nobody else saw and extrapolated it twenty iterations forward. I'm just completely amazed, every time, to realize how prescient he was. -- Bill Viola

Youngblood's Expanded Cinema stands as one of the classics of the interdisciplinary field that studies media, art, and science. -- Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art Gene Youngblood is the medium's Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote our Declaration of Independence, who marked out a vision of media and democracy that remains an invaluable guide to media culture and a document of extraordinary vision and prophecy. -- Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Gene Youngblood didn't just capture the zeitgeist of his generation. He was the zeitgeist of his generation. -- Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy I've never had an experience with a book like I had with Expanded Cinema. Gene Youngblood saw something nobody else saw and extrapolated it twenty iterations forward. I'm just completely amazed, every time, to realize how prescient he was. -- Bill Viola

...[an] advocate of the artist-scientist, Youngblood is terribly interested in how things work, and between celebrations of the cybernetic self, he lays down a very fine primer on intersections between artists and video and computer technology at the beginning of the 1970s. Youngblood may be looking at the stars, but he's grounded firmly in the nuts and bolts.-- Film Comment Stan VanDerBeek coined the phrase 'expanded cinema.' But it was Gene Youngblood who put it on the cover of a book, filled it with rocket fuel, and sent it buzzing through the late-1960s art world like a heat-seeking missile. For its fiftieth anniversary, Expanded Cinema has been lovingly reissued by Fordham University Press with a substantial new memoir-ish introduction by the author. The volume reminds us to locate the techno-anarchic edge of what became 'new media' on the left coast, where filmmakers, psychedelic engineers, and intermedia practitioners wrested cybernetics from its military command-control origins in machine feedback loops and put it in dialogue with the autopoiesis of self-regulating, life-entangled systems mixing 'mescaline and logarithms.' . . . What makes the book so terrific is Youngblood's heartfelt embrace of all these performative tinkerers trying to blast humanity into a higher state. His generosity is everywhere on display in these pages: a willingness, on our behalf, to sit, to listen, to endure, to space out, to vibrate with, to drift off, to rock out, to witness, and to report in gorgeous prose on the 'shimmering trilling universe' he experienced. -- Artforum Expanded Cinema defined the world of what is now known as media arts.---Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar, Expanded Cinema is one of the most prescient books written about our modern age.---Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art, Gene Youngblood didn't just capture the zeitgeist of his generation. He was the zeitgeist of his generation.---Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Gene Youngblood is the medium's Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote our Declaration of Independence, who marked out a vision of media and democracy that remains an invaluable guide to media culture and a document of extraordinary vision and prophecy.---Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I've never had an experience with a book like I had with Expanded Cinema. Gene Youngblood saw something nobody else saw and extrapolated it twenty iterations forward. I'm just completely amazed, every time, to realize how prescient he was.---Bill Viola, Youngblood's Expanded Cinema stands as one of the classics of the interdisciplinary field that studies media, art, and science.---Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, What if film criticism could read as science fiction? That question crossed my mind as I was reading Gene Youngblood's influential 1970 survey, ... that functions as history and augury at once. Youngblood offers... an integrative approach to some of the most radical modes of moviemaking in the 1960s, bringing together bodies of work that might otherwise be understood in contradiction-- Stan Brakhage meets Bell Labs... Expanded Cinema is a future forecast by way of a vibe report.---Thomas Beard, Artforum

Author Information

Gene Youngblood (Author) Gene Youngblood is a well-known theorist of electronic media arts and a respected scholar in the history and theory of experimental film and video art. He has split his career between teaching and journalism and is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the Media Democracy movement. R. Buckminster Fuller (Introducer) R. Buckminster Fuller was an architect, designer, inventor, social theorist, and the author of more than thirty books, including the legendary Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

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