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Expanded Cinema
Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
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. R. Buckminster Fuller (Introducer) R. Buckminster Fuller was an architect, designer, inventor, social theorist, and the author of more than thirty books, including the legendary Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Press Reviews:
I’ve never had an experience with a book like I had with Expanded Cinema. Gene Youngblood saw something nobody else saw and extrapolated it twenty iterations forward. I’m just completely amazed, every time, to realize how prescient he was.---Bill Viola
Gene Youngblood didn’t just capture the zeitgeist of his generation. He was the zeitgeist of his generation.---Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
"Stan VanDerBeek coined the phrase ‘expanded cinema.’ But it was Gene Youngblood who put it on the cover of a book, filled it with rocket fuel, and sent it buzzing through the late-1960s art world like a heat-seeking missile. For its fiftieth anniversary, Expanded Cinema has been lovingly reissued by Fordham University Press with a substantial new memoir-ish introduction by the author. The volume reminds us to locate the techno-anarchic edge of what became ‘new media’ on the left coast, where filmmakers, psychedelic engineers, and intermedia practitioners wrested cybernetics from its military command-control origins in machine feedback loops and put it in dialogue with the autopoiesis of self-regulating, life-entangled systems mixing ‘mescaline and logarithms.’ . . . What makes the book so terrific is Youngblood’s heartfelt embrace of all these performative tinkerers trying to blast humanity into a higher state. His generosity is everywhere on display in these pages: a willingness, on our behalf, to sit, to listen, to endure, to space out, to vibrate with, to drift off, to rock out, to witness, and to report in gorgeous prose on the ‘shimmering trilling universe’ he experienced." - Artforum
Gene Youngblood is the medium’s Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote our Declaration of Independence, who marked out a vision of media and democracy that remains an invaluable guide to media culture and a document of extraordinary vision and prophecy.---Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema stands as one of the classics of the interdisciplinary field that studies media, art, and science.---Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art
Expanded Cinema is one of the most prescient books written about our modern age.---Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art
Expanded Cinema defined the world of what is now known as media arts.---Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar
What if film criticism could read as science fiction? That question crossed my mind as I was reading Gene Youngblood’s influential 1970 survey,... that functions as history and augury at once. Youngblood offers... an integrative approach to some of the most radical modes of moviemaking in the 1960s, bringing together bodies of work that might otherwise be understood in contradiction— Stan Brakhage meets Bell Labs... Expanded Cinema is a future forecast by way of a vibe report.---Thomas Beard, Artforum
...[an] advocate of the artist-scientist, Youngblood is terribly interested in how things work, and between celebrations of the cybernetic self, he lays down a very fine primer on intersections between artists and video and computer technology at the beginning of the 1970s. Youngblood may be looking at the stars, but he’s grounded firmly in the nuts and bolts. - Film Comment
See the publisher website: Fordham University Press
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Screen Methods (2006)
Comparative Readings in Film Studies
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Jung and Film (2001)
Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image
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