An argument that the collaborative multimedia projects produced by
Stan VanDerBeek in the 1960s and 1970s anticipate contemporary new media
and participatory art practices.
In 1965, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) unveiled
his Movie-Drome, made from the repurposed top of a grain silo.
VanDerBeek envisioned Movie-Drome as the prototype for a
communications system--a global network of Movie-Dromes linked to
orbiting satellites that would store and transmit images. With networked
two-way communication, Movie-Dromes were meant to ameliorate
technology's alienating impulse. In The Experience Machine, Gloria
Sutton views VanDerBeek--known mostly for his experimental animated
films--as a visual artist committed to the radical aesthetic
sensibilities he developed during his studies at Black Mountain College.
She argues that VanDerBeek's collaborative multimedia projects of the
1960s and 1970s (sometimes characterized as "Expanded Cinema"), with
their emphases on transparency of process and audience engagement,
anticipate contemporary art's new media, installation, and participatory
practices.
VanDerBeek saw Movie-Drome not as pure cinema but as a communication
tool, an "experience machine." In her close reading of the work, Sutton
argues that Movie-Drome can be understood as a programmable interface.
She describes the immersive experience of Movie-Drome, which
emphasized multi-sensory experience over the visual; display strategies
deployed in the work; the Poemfield computer-generated short films;
and VanDerBeek's interest, unique for the time, in telecommunications
and computer processing as a future model for art production. Sutton
argues that visual art as a direct form of communication is a feedback
mechanism, which turns on a set of relations, not a technology.
