Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (Online Group Video Session)

Image: Still from John Cage & Leharen Hiller, HPSCRD, 2013

On 28th April 2020, the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group will be holding another interactive video chat (via Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/84055532832) from 19:30 – 22:30. This will involve the opportunity to share random thoughts, ideas and any projects we are working on. Following this we will be discussing Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (See below). If you would like to get involved please message me at explodingappendix@gmail.com.

“When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded Cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded Cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it is a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside his mind, in front of his eyes. One can no longer specialise in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a single picture of its relationship in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.”

– Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, p.41

Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema was a ground-breaking book that explored how experimental approaches to film, video art, television, computer films and multimedia theatre were expanding the very definition of cinema. Just as the birth of the Guttenberg printing press made possible a new form of consciousness (the reformation), Youngblood looked forward to how this ‘expanded cinema’ would create new environments, and with it, a new expanded consciousness. The book is both fascinating and relevant not merely for its exploration of experimental multimedia art of its time, but also as a prophecy of the internet. Drawing on the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, the architectural thought of Buckminster Fuller and the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, Youngblood takes us on a journey through synaesthetic cinema, cybernetics, computer films, Human sensoriums, intermedia theatre, multiple-projection environments and holographic cinema, whilst exploring how newly emerging technologies could create a new psychic outlook. Bradley Tuck will lead a group discussion using selected film and video clips. The book can be read here. Prior reading is welcome, but not necessary.