Expanded Cinema

This is one of the founding books of media studies and helped to establish experimental video as a cultural form.

Contributor: Gene Youngblood 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.

...[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. --- 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 --- Expanded Cinema defined the world of what is now known as media arts.---Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar --- Expanded Cinema is one of the most prescient books written about our modern age.---Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art --- 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 --- 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 --- “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.” --- 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 --- 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