Slide One: The topic for today’s class is Expanded Cinema – a cinematic form that emerged in the late 1960s and was fully theorized in the 1970s, which persists today, in various forms – as video + film installations, urban screen projections, Youtube channels, TV webisodes... As the term suggests, it is something beyond traditional cinema – cinema + This slide shows an except from a media event by Andy Warhol called, Exploding Plastic Inevitable produced in 1966 and 1967: more a show with media than a media installation work it nonetheless represents a precedent to what we call video/film installation – the work involves a simultaneous projection of Warhol’s film works onto the walls of the exhibition spaces and musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBfnukdsmSs Slide Two: We’re going to be looking at film/video installation as an instance of Expanded cinema, situating its roots in experimental film and video work from the 1960s + 1970s. Some of you may have seen the Manifesto video installation by Julian Rosefeldt at the Musee d’art contemporain last year: a thirteen channel immersive video installation that pays tribute to the tradition of manifestos by way of a series of thirteen monologues - all delivered by Cate Blanchett who takes on various roles representing different social types; the monologues borrow dialogue from artistic and political manifestoes form the late 19th and 20th centuries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOA6ramO1aw&feature=emb_logo Slide Three: You will see a definition of the term take from PR material for an exhibition in 2009 at the Tate on Expanded cinema. I’ll elaborate a bit more. As the slide suggests, the term expanded cinema was first coined in the early 1960s by artist Stan Vanderbeek to acknowledge an expanding realm of cinematic and media production that was enabled by the availability of small format and inexpensive film and video technologies, as well as the emergence of computational art. Opened to amateurs, and serving a myriad of artistic, educational, commercial and personal purposes, cinema was becoming a more common form of communication and found in a wide range of public and private settings. Slide Four: Formalizing the term in his 1970 book entitled Expanded Cinema Gene Youngblood, a critic and scholar of media arts, celebrated the democratizing possibilities of such expansion and anticipated novel and revolutionary application in artistic and political practice. In particular, he looked to a new generation of filmmakers, avant-garde artists (among them Stan Vanderbeek who first coined the term, as well as Stan Brakhage, James, John and Michael Whitney) and experiments with media (like those seen at Expo ’67) for examples of this changing media landscape. Simultaneously, there was an experimental film movement in Britain identified in similar terms, concerned with the relationship between the mechanisms of cinema and the audience. The book included chapters concerned with thing like “Synaesthetic Cinema”, “Cosmic Consciousness” “Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films, “Intermedia” and “Holographic Cinema” – topics that more and less correctly anticipated some more recent media forms. 1 Slide Five + Slide Six: Stan Vanderbeek first used the term “expanded cinema” in the title of a 1966 article written to advocate a new approach to moving making and to describe his own experiments with cinematic projections. Entitled “’Culture: Intercom’ and Expanded Cinema: a proposal and manifesto” the essay supported the development of a new “picture language based on motion pictures” and a new modality of moving picture exhibition he invented called the “Movie-Drome”. Slide 5 shows Vanderbeek outside a Movie Drone theatre. Conceived in response to contemporaneous advances in “technological research, development and involvement” that he believed had “almost completely outdistanced our emotional and socio-‘logical’ comprehension”, Vanderbeek argued that a new “non-verbal international language” invented by “the world’s artists” would “penetrate the unconscious” to “reach for the emotional denominator of all men, the non-verbal basis of human life, thought and understanding” and would “inspire all men of good will.” The movie drome itself was imagined as an exhibition space incorporating multiple projections of thousands of images onto a spherical dome, in a new form of new form of filmic presentation called, variously, “Movie-Murals,” “Ethos-Cinema,” “Newsreel of Dreams,” “Feedback,” or “Image Libraries.” The audience would lie down to see these projections, which were compared to collage of facts and data and take “what it can or wants from the presentation and makes its own conclusions. Each member of the audience will build its own references and realizations from the image flow.” His concept is to maximize the “use of the information devices that we now have at our disposal” and make cinema into a “performing art and image library”. Follow the link to see an example of a more recent installation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- Vp1xJdWrOk Slide Seven: Here is an excerpt from Stan VanDerbeek’s a1966 article. Slide Eight: Comparing the aesthetic of Andy Warhol’s EPE. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable had its beginnings in an event staged on January 13, 1966, at a dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This event, called "Up-Tight", included performances by the Velvet Underground and Nico, along with Malanga and Edie Sedgwick as dancers and Barbara Rubin as a performance artist. Inaugural shows were held at the Dom in New York City in April 1966, advertised in The Village Voice as follows: "The Silver Dream Factory Presents The Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Andy Warhol/The Velvet Underground/and Nico."[4] Shows were also held in The Gymnasium in New York and in various cities throughout the United States. 2 Slide Nine + Ten: Numerous other artists experimented with media installation works – two examples follow: A performance/installation works by Carolee Schneeman (Snows, 1967); and video sculpture by Nam June Paik. Slide Eleven: Beyond cinema and media works, there was a lot excitement about technology in the art worlds of the late 1960s, and a lot of collaboration between different arts disciplines and sciences. One of the more important projects was E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology – an organization established to bring artists and engineers together. One of the most important projects produced by EAT was the 9 Evenings event series at the 69th Regent Armory in Manhatten: Artists included experimental composer John Cage, dancers Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer, filmmakers Lucinda Childs and Robert Whitman as well as the painter/collagist Robert Rauchenberg who worked with IBM engineer Billy Kluver to transform a tennis racket into an electrified sound device. The event series was not well received by the popular press: it was the age of space race and a celebration of the wondrous possibilities of new technologies and an electrified sound-emitting tennis racket fell far short of expectations. Nonetheless, though this project may have fallen short of expectations, overall the collaboration produced a number of fruitful innovations in both the arts and technologies. Tanya Leighton suggests “The prevalent attitude was that art possessed special and redemptive powers and when combined with technology could counteract what was perceived as the latter’s deleterious effects – a humanist view characterized by the utopian ideal of fusing art and technology, believing that it was unrealistic for art and tech to develop separately if some sort of revolution was to ensue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoxuzPPstXc Slide Twelve + Thirteen: Some of you may be familiar with the writing of Marshall McLuhan a Canadian Communications theorist whose writings on technology during the 1960s made him a household name, famous for such terms as “the global village” and media is the message (the original title turned into a pun: mess age/mass age). The journalist Thomas Wolfe wrote a profile about McLuhan in the New York Herald Tribune that called him “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov.” He was a darling of late night talks shows and magazines, on the cover of Newsweek, profiled in Esquire, Life and Playboy. He was was chosen to interview Lennon and Yoko Ono about the end of the war for CBS, and Abbie Hoffman called him “more relevant than Marx.” The term “the medium is the message” is not meant to dismiss the content of messages, but to point to the ways in which the media chosen for expression is itself significant for the ways their usage shapes human interaction. A book or letter versus a televised message presents information differently and requires different kinds of participation from the message receiver. 3 His ideas were original, but they were also timely. With advances in new information forms – satellite technology for global transmissions, developments in computer technology and expanded screen technologies the social, economic and cultural possibilities presented by new media forms were on everyone’s mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H73PZpP-rKs Slide Fourteen + Fifteen The world’s fairs are good examples of the media-centrism of the period The theme for the 1964 World’s Fair was “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” and one of its highlights was the Eames/Saarinen IBM Pavilion and within it, their Ovid Theatre, which housed a field of 22 multi-sized, multi-shaped screens. A huge hydraulic lift lifted a completely seated audience of 500 people fifty feet into the theatre – called ‘the information machine’ – to see Think, the Easmes film that celebrated the world of design offering problem solving techniques for everything to seating at a differ party to city planning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UZYG33D2B4&feature=emb_logo Slide Sixteen: Entitled “Man and his World” the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal was equally interested in technology, and screen technology in particular.