In our second program focusing on Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema, Lightstruck will focus on artists who – through their visionary use of incredible machines both homemade and hi-tech – produced works that sought to extend and externalize human consciousness in a cinematic form uniting mind, heart, spirit, and soul. Youngblood was fascinated by the ambitious and artful employment of technology in motion pictures in the 1960s, and saw both the humble DIY innovations and the massive mainframes alike as potential conduits for enhanced human engagement, and an evolutionary stepping-stone for multi-sensorial exploration.
Trailblazing and wildly diverse computer animations by Stan VanDerBeek and Lillian Schwartz (each working with pioneer Ken Knowlton), as well as John Whitney and Michael Whitney, will establish the radical abstraction origins of the computer arts. In the analog domain, James Whitney’s rapturous masterpiece Lapis and three unparalleled films by Jordan Belson will make perhaps the most convincing possible argument for cinema as a vehicle for contemplative transcendence. The evening will conclude with what we believe to be the first 16mm performance of John Whitney Jr.’s legendary three-screen film, Side Phase Drift, in over 50 years, with John Jr. himself operating the center projector. This will definitely be a very special show not to be missed!
Program:
- Experiments in Motion Graphics (1967-68) by John Whitney
- Poemfield 7 (1967-68) by Stan VanDerBeek with Ken Knowlton
- Olympiad (1971) by Lillian Schwartz with Ken Knowlton
- UFOs (1971) by Lillian Schwartz with Ken Knowlton
- Byjina Flores (1966) by John Whitney Jr.
- Binary Bit Patterns (1969) by Michael Whitney
- Matrix III (1972) by John Whitney
- Lapis (1966) by James Whitney
- Phenomena (1965) by Jordan Belson
- Samadhi (1967) by Jordan Belson
- Momentum (1969) by Jordan Belson
- *plus* Side Phase Drift (1965), John Whitney Jr.'s three-screen film
