The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (Leonardo Book Series)

Description

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.