Our third and final installment of this three-part series devoted to Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema explores the outermost reaches of technological innovation spanning the late ‘60s to early ‘70s, highlighting creative connectivity through exceptional investigations of the cathode ray tube and other far-out forms of aesthetic-synesthetic interactivity.
To Youngblood, the possibility of film and video broadcast by way of television offered far more than just an endpoint of entertainment to a stultified, couch-bound public. TV and video proposed a new gateway to instantaneous global communication and with it a framework for the expansion of human awareness through the immediate convergence of millions on a massive scale. Youngblood optimistically pondered the “Videosphere”, chronicling and predicting near-infinite capabilities and opportunities for electronic transmission already being probed by filmmakers such as Nam June Paik, Scott Bartlett, Tom DeWitt Ditto, and Aldo Tambellini. Through use of projections, videotronics, light shows, sensory environments, and the fertile conjunctions of performance and media, fresh forms of self-expression were being synthesized by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Jud Yalkut, Yayoi Kusama, Single Wing Turquoise Bird, and other radical innovators.
Our Expanded Cinema series concludes with a selection of stimulating film and video works by these and many other artists, all of them seeking to redefine and extend the moving image as an artistic practice pushing far beyond the screen. The program will open with a live feedback installation by video artist Jennifer Juniper Stratford, and will culminate in a consciousness-altering 1969 television collaboration between kinetic sculptor Arlo Acton and visionary composer Terry Riley.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Zena Grey. Poster art by Robert Beatty. Special thanks to Jennifer Juniper Stratford. All films courtesy of the artists/distributors, and supplied by (and with huge thanks to) David Lebrun, Jon Shibata at Pacific Film Archive, Karl McCool at Electronic Arts Intermix, Canyon Cinema, Light Cone, and The Film-makers’ Cooperative.
