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.
