Cinema In The Expanded Field

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.

This volume, published in parallel to Exhibiting the Moving Image, extends the inquiry into the history, theory and practice of exhibiting artists' cinema, video, installation as well as advertising films, by focusing on the domains of performance and of

Theatre in the Expanded Field is a fiercely original, bold and daring exploration of the fields of theatre and performance studies and the received narratives and histories that underpin them. Rich with interdisciplinary reference, international, eclectic and broad-ranging in its examples, it offers readers a compelling and provocative reassessment of the disciplines, one that spans pre-history to the present day. Sixty years ago, in 1962, Richard Southern wrote a remarkable book called The Seven Ages of the Theatre. It was unusual in its time for taking a trans-disciplinary, new-historical and avowedly internationalist approach to its subject - nothing less than a totalizing view of its field. Theatre in the Expanded Field does not attempt to mimic Southern's work but rather takes his spirit of adventure and ambition as its frame for the contemporary moment of performance and its diverse pasts. Identifying seven ways of exploring the performance field, from pre-history to postdramatic theatre the book presents studies of both contemporary and historical works not as a chronological succession, but in keeping with their coeval qualities, as movements or 'generations' of connection and interaction, dissensus and interruption. It does this with the same purpose as Richard Southern's original work: to provide for the planning of responsive performance spaces 'now'. Illustrated throughout with line-drawings, Theatre in the Expanded Field is as richly rewarding as it is ambitious and expansive in it vision.

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary, ' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the 1990s, a cinematographic turn has taken place in contemporary art, paralleled by the emergence of a cinema of exhibition. This collection of new essays investigates the relationships between the white cube and the black box, focusing mainly on the 1970s, a decade in which film practices and moving images were integrated into museums and art spaces. The authors analyze multiple modalities of presenting the moving image through historical case studies: the anatomy of video art, expanded cinema, artists' films and installations, and the moving image in the public sphere. Exploring examples from the 1930s to the present, these contributions address commercial, spectacular or advertising forms of moving images, artists' performative practices, installations in large museums, exhibitions devoted to projections and festivals of experimental films.

In this book leading scholars from Europe and North-America trace expanded cinema from its origins in early abstract film to post-war happenings and live events in Europe and the US; the first video and multi-media experiments of the 1960s; the fusion of multi-screen art with sonic art and music from the 1970s onwards, right up to the digital age. It brings new perspectives to bear on the work of established American pioneers such as Carolee Schneemann and Stan Vanderbeek as well as exploring expanded cinema in Western and Central Europe, the influence of video art on new media technologies, and the role of British expanded cinema from the 1970s to the present day. It shows how artists challenged the conventions of spectatorship, the viewing space and the audience, to explore a new participatory and performative cinema beyond the single screen.

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.