Expanded Cinema: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition - Paperback

by Gene Youngblood (Author)

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category.

Back Jacket

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish experimental video as a cultural form

First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood's influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video as an art medium. Long considered the Bible for media creators, this is the fiftieth anniversary reissue of Youngblood's insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics that remains a mainstay reference in today's hypermediated digital world.

A unique eyewitness account of the emergence of abstract film and experimental video in the late 1960s, this far‐ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Written at a time when video, computers, and holography were new cinematic tools, Youngblood examines the wide bandwidth of creative energies moving through the media intelligentsia of the later 1960s. 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 in each field are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Stanley Kubrick, 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. Buckmister 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 art-historical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment. A new introduction offers conceptual tools for understanding sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. Second-order systems theory and concepts like secession from the broadcast, autonomous reality-communities, media homeworlds, technologies of the self, and the challenge to create at the same scale as we can destroy can help us to negotiate the unstable horizon of our uncertain future.

Filled with provocative post‐McLuhan philosophical probes, Expanded Cinema is invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

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.

Author Biography

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.