Expanded Cinema, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

By Gene Youngblood
Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller
Meaning Systems
Published 2020
ISBN: 9780823287413
Page Count: 464
Trim Size: 5.5in x 8.25in
Illustrations: 60 color illustrations and 284 b/w illustrations

Pre-order now from Fordham University Press, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823287413/expanded-cinema/

Cover image from Jordan Belson’s 16mm film “Samadhi”

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 art-historical 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.

Gene Youngblood is a well-known theorist of electronic media arts and a respected scholar in the history ana 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) was an architect, designer, inventor, social theorist, and the author of more than thirty books, including the legendary Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Reviews

“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

“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 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

“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

Pre-order now from Fordham University Press, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823287413/expanded-cinema/

L’edizione italiana / The Italian Edition

L’edizione italiana del libro originale, a cura di Pier Luigi Capucci e Simonetta Fadda, con un Glossario di Francesco Monico, è stata pubblicata nel 2013 da <mediaversi> (https://www.mediaversi.it), una collana editoriale coprodotta da Noema-CLUEB.

The Italian edition of the original book, curated by Pier Luigi Capucci and Simonetta Fadda, with a Glossary by Francesco Monico, has been published in 2013 by <mediaversi> (https://www.mediaversi.it), a book serie co-produced by Noema-CLUEB.

Dalla quarta di copertina

Expanded Cinema, che abbiamo il piacere di offrire al lettore italiano per la prima volta, presenta un approccio aperto sull’apporto che i nuovi strumenti possono dare alla creatività. Le tecnologie sono l’anima del nuovo, il motore dell’innovazione, rimodellano continuamente la dimensione materiale della società, la conoscenza, il corpo, gli strumenti e i dispositivi, modificando quelli esistenti e creandone di nuovi. Il computer, il video, la realtà virtuale, l’olografia, e più in generale le tecnologie di rappresentazione, “espandono il cinema” perché creano forme espressive che istituiscono modalità di realizzazione, fruizione, distribuzione e condivisione che sono al di fuori del cinema. E aprono orizzonti teorici, culturali, estetici, sociali ed economici nuovi.

Ma il cinema è “espanso” anche per la prospettiva generale che pervade il volume di Youngblood, costituendone un tratto fondamentale: l’intima commistione tra forme comunicative, artistiche, scienze e tecnologie.

Per Youngblood arte, comunicazione e tecnologia costituiscono elementi fondamentali e strettamente correlati. Le sue idee anticipano le riflessioni contemporanee sia per quanto riguarda gli studi cinematografici sulle tecnologie audiovisive sia per quanto riguarda l’evoluzione dei new media dal cinema. Nel mettere in rilievo, anche attraverso l’analisi di numerosi lavori, la continua sperimentazione sulle forme e l’ibridazione di media e tecnologie, il lavoro di Youngblood anticipa anche quel campo artistico, oggi rilevante, generalmente conosciuto col nome di “new media arts”.

Expanded Cinema