ARTSCILAB 2001

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Gene Youngblood became a passenger of Spaceship Earth on May
30, 1942. He is a faculty member of the California Institute of the
Arts, School of Critical Studies. Since 1961 he has worked in all
aspects of communications media: for five years he was reporter,
feature writer, and film critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner; in
1965 he conducted a weekly program on film and the arts for KPFK,
Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles; in 1967 he wrote, produced, directed,
edited, and on-camera reported "human interest" filmed news
features for KHJ-TV in Los Angeles; since 1967 his column
“Intermedia” has appeared weekly in the Los Angeles Free Press on
subjects ranging from film and the arts to science, technology, and
the cultural revolution. Mr. Youngblood currently is working on two
books: The Videosphere, about global television in the 1970s as a
tool for conscious evolution, and Earth Nova, a philosophical novel
and screenplay about the new consciousness, the new lifestyle, and
their relation to technology.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

 EXPANDED CINEMA

 

by Gene Youngblood
Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller

 

A Dutton Paperback

 

P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York 1970
ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Copyright © 1970 by Gene Youngblood

 

Introduction and poem, "Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology,"
copyright © 1970 by R. Buckminster Fuller

 

All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

 

First Edition

 

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without
permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who wishes to
quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a
magazine or newspaper or broadcast.

 

Published simultaneously in Canada by
Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver.

 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 71-87207

 

SBN 0— 525— 10152— 7(Cloth) SBN 0— 525— 7263— 0 (DP)

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

To Nancy

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Contents

 

List of Illustrations 11
Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller 15
Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology

 

by R. Buckminster Fuller 37
Preface 41

 

Part One: The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment 45
Radical Evolution and Future Shock

 

in the Paleocybernetic Age 50
The Intermedia Network as Nature 54
Popular Culture and the Noosphere 57
Art, Entertainment, Entropy 59
Retrospective Man and the Human Condition 66
The Artist as Design Scientist 70

 

Part Two: Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama 75
Global Closed Circuit: The Earth as Software 78
Synaestheic Synthesis: Simultaneous Perception of
Harmonic Opposites 81
Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage 84
Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness 92
Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience
97
Mythopoeia: The End of Fiction 106
Synaesthetics and Synergy 109
Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism 112
Synaesthetic Cinema and Extra-Objective Reality 122
Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age 128

 

Part Three: Toward Cosmic Consciousness 135
2001: The New Nostalgia 139
The Stargate Corridor 151
The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 157

 

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10 Expanded Cinema

 

Part Four: Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films 179

 

The Technosphere: Man/Machine Symbiosis 180
The Human Bio-Computer and His Electronic Brainchild 183
Hardware and Software 185
The Aesthetic Machine 189
Cybernetic Cinema 194
Computer Films 207

 

Part Five: Television as a Creative Medium 257

 

The Videosphere 260
Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 265
Synaesthetic Videotapes 281
Videographic Cinema 317
Closed-Circuit Television and Teledynamic Environments 337

 

Part Six: Intermedia 345

 

The Artist as Ecologist 346
World Expositions and Nonordinary Reality

 

352
Cerebrum: Intermedia and the Human Sensorium 359
Intermedia Theatre 365
Multiple-Projection Environments 387

 

Part Seven: Holographic Cinema: A New World 399

 

Wave-Front Reconstruction: Lensless Photography 400
Dr. Alex Jacobson: Holography in Motion 404
Limitations of Holographic Cinema 407
Projecting Holographic Movies 411
The Kinoform: Computer-Generated Holographic Movies 414
Technoanarchy: The Open Empire 415

 

Selected Bibliography 421
Index 427

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Illustrations

 

Color Plates (Following page 432)

 

Jordan Belson: Phenomena
Jordan Belson: Samadhi and Momentum
John Whitney: Permutations
John Whitney: Permutations
John Whitney, Jr.: Images from triple-projection computer film
John Stehura: Cybernetik 5.3
Terry Riley and Arlo Acton: Music With Balls
Philip Makanna: The Empire of Things
James Seawright: Capriccio for TV
Nam June Paik: Three experiments with color cathode tube
Scott Bartlett: OFFON
Clouds of barium atoms ionized by solar radiation

 

Black-and-white Plates

 

Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man 89
Will Hindle: Chinese Firedrill 94
Patrick O'Neill: 7362 98
John Schofill: XFilm 101
Ronald Nameth: Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable 104
Paul Morrissey: Flesh 118
Carolee Schneemann: Fuses 120
Michael Snow: Wavelength 123
Mystical alignment of planets and sun in 2001: A Space Odyssey 142
Starchild Embryo from 2001: A Space Odyssey 145
Stargate Corridor from 2001: A Space Odyssey 152
Slit-scan machine 155
Jordan Belson: Allures 161
Jordon Belson: Re-Entry 164
Jordan Belson: Re-Entry 165
Jordan Belson: Samadhi 170
Jordan Belson: Momentum 175
Stereo pairs from a film by A. Michael Noll 190
Mechanical analogue plotter (above); animated sequence (below) 195
Cybernetic movie studio 197
Reclining nude scanned and reconstructed by computer 201

 

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12 Expanded Cinema

 

Charles Csuri: Hummingbird 202
Demonstration of RCA's liquid crystal display 204
John Whitney working with his mechanical analogue computer 209
Detail shots of mechanical analogue computer 211
John Whitney: Catalogue 212
Dr. Jack Citron of IBM Los Angeles 219
James Whitney: Lapis 224
James Whitney: Lapis 225
John Whitney, Jr.: Untitled 232
Michael Whitney: Binary Bit Patterns 235
The Whitney brothers 237
John Stehura: Cybernetik 5.3 240
Computer interpretation of the word "movies" 247
Variations of the Beflix technique 248
Peter Kamnitzer: City-Scape 251
The Picturephone 262
Use of Chroma-Key video matting 271
Use of two cameras and three VTRs 272
Composite scene from the Limbo program 273
Stan VanDerBeek at work 278
Disintegration of form in Videospace 286
Use of six levels of delayed videotape superimpositions 288
Loren Sears: Sorcery 290
Otto Piene: Electronic Light Ballet 300
Electromagnetic distortions of the video image by Nam June Paik 305
Nam June Paik with charlotte Moorman in TV Bra for Living

 

Sculpture 307
Aldo Tambellini: Black TV 309
Aldo Tambellini: Black Video Two 310
Aldo Tambellini in control room of WGBH-TV, Boston 312
Eric Siegel: Psychedelevision 315
Scott Bartlett: Moon 322
Tom DeWitt: The Leap 325
Scott Bartlett filming Tom DeWitt 327
Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces 329
The King of Sweden as seen in Monument 332

Paul McCartney in Monument 333
Lutz Becker: Horizon 335
Les Levine with Iris 338
Les Levine with Contact 341
Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider: Wipe Cycle 342

 

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Illustrations 13

 

Stan VanDerBeek with multifaceted surface 349
Stan VanDerBeek presides over intermedia presentation 350
Chamber One of Roman Kroitor's Labyrinthe at Expo '67 353
Chamber Three of Labyrinthe 354
Two scenes from Francis Thompson's We Are Young 355
The Diapolyceran Screen at Expo '67 356
The Diapolyceran Screen 357
Sensory-kinetic multi-media experience at Cerebrum 360
Cerebrum, New York City 362
Carolee Schneemann: Night Crawlers 367
Carolee Schneemann: Illinois Central 372
Centers: A Ritual of Alignments performed by Milton Cohen 373
ONCE Group: Unmarked Interchange 375
Milton Cohen's Space Theatre 376
John Cage and Ronald Nameth: HPSCHD 377
Two scenes from Ronald Nameth's As the World Turns 379
Two scenes from Robert Whitman's Prune Flat 380
Aldo Tambellini: Black Zero 382
Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene: Black Gate Cologne 384
Wolf Vostell: Electronic Happening Room 385
Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson 388
Planetarium projector equipped for Vortex Concerts 390
Isobe's Floating Theatre at Oneonta, N.Y. 393
Two images from the lightworks of the Single Wing Turquoise Bird 395
Sequence of images from Circles 397
Diffusion of a laser beam 401
Multiple-exposure photo approximation of an animated hologram 402
Two photos from holographic movie of tropical fish 405
Schematic diagram of Hughes holographic movie system 405
Hughes holographic projection system 408
Holographic movie viewing system developed

 

by North American Philips Corporation 409
Hemispherical mirror developed by Los Angeles

 

chapter of Experiments in Art and Technology 417

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction
by R. Buckminster Fuller

 

At all times nowadays, there are approximately 66 million human
beings around Earth who are living comfortably inside their mothers'
wombs. The country called Nigeria embraces one-fourth of the
human beings of the great continent of Africa. There are 66 million
Nigerians. We can say that the number of people living in Wombland
is about the same as one-fourth the population of Africa. This 66
million Womblanders tops the total population of either West
Germany's 58 million, the United Kingdom's 55 million, Italy's 52
million, France's 50 million, or Mexico's 47 million. Only nine of the
world's so-called countries (China, India, Soviet Union, United
States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan, and Brazil) have individual
populations greater than our luxuriously-living, under-nine-monthsold
Womblanders.

 

Seemingly switching our subject, but only for a moment, we note
that for the last two decades scientists probing with electrodes have
learned a great deal about the human brain. The brain gives off
measurable energy and discrete wave patterns disclosed by the
oscillograph. Specific, repetitive dreams have been identified by
these wave patterns. The neurological and physiological explorers
do not find it extravagant to speculate that we may learn that what
humanity has thus far spoken of mystifiedly as telepathy, science will
have discovered, within decades, to be ultra-ultra high-frequency
electro-magnetic wave propagations.

 

All good science fiction develops realistically that which scientific
data suggests to be imminent. It is good science fiction to suppose
that a superb telepathetic communication system is inter-linking all
those young citizens of worldaround Wombland. We intercept one of
the conversations: "How are things over there with you?" Answer:
"My mother is planning to call me either Joe or Mary. She doesn't
know that my call frequency is already 7567-00-3821." Other: "My
mother had better apply to those characters Watson, Crick, and
Wilkerson for my call numbers!" And another of their 66 million

 

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16 Expanded Cinema

 

Womblanders comes in with, "I'm getting very apprehensive about
having to 'go outside.' We have been hearing from some of the kids
who just got out— They say we are going to be cut off from the main
supply. We are going to have to shovel fuel and pour liquids into our
systems. We are going to have to make our own blood. We are
going to have to start pumping some kind of gas into our lungs to
purify our own blood. We are going to have to make ourselves into
giants fifteen times our present size. Worst of all, we are going to
have to learn to lie about everything. It's going to be a lot of work,
very dangerous, and very discouraging." Answer: "Why don't we
strike? We are in excellent posture for a 'sit-down.'" Other: "Wow!
What an idea. We will have the whole population of worldaround
Wombland refuse to go out at graduation day. Our cosmic population
will enter more and more human women's wombs, each refusing to
graduate at nine months. More and more Earthian women will get
more and more burdened. Worldaround consternation— agony. We
will notify the outsiders that, until they stop lying to themselves and to
each other and give up their stupid sovereignties and exclusive
holier-than-thou ideologies, pollutions, and mayhem, we are going to
refuse to come out. Only surgery fatal to both the mothers and
ourselves could evacuate us."

 

Another: "Great! We had might as well do it. If we do come out
we will be faced with the proliferation of Cold War's guerrillerized
killing of babies for psycho-shock demoralization of worldaround
innocent communities inadvertently involved in the abstruse
ideological warfare waged by diametrically opposed, equally
stubborn, would-be do-gooder, bureaucratic leaders and their
partisans who control all of the world's means of production and
killing, whose numbers (including all the politically preoccupied
individuals around the Earth) represent less than one per cent of all
humanity, to whose human minds and hearts the politicos and their
guns give neither satisfaction nor hope. Like the women in Lysistrata
who refused intercourse with their men until they stopped fighting, we
Womblanders would win."

 

Until yesterday, what are now the 150 member nations of our
planet's United Nations were tiny groups of humans who for two
million years had been regenerating around our globe so remotely

 

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Introduction 17

 

from one another that each colony, nation, or tribe was utterly unaware
of one another's existence. Only through telepathy, as
supposedly operative in the previous paragraphs, could those remote
cells of precariously-surviving human beings have been aware
of one another throughout those two million years. In the last few
split seconds of overall history, there emerged a dozen millennia ago
from the womb of tribal remoteness a few sailors and overland
explorers who began to discover the presence of other humans
scattered around the mysterious world. Finding the tribes to be each
unaware of either the surprising resources or the vital needs and
desires of the others, they kept the whereabouts of these surprise
demands and supplies secret and thus were able, through monopoly
of commerce and middle-manning, to exploit to their own special
advantage the vital needs, ignorance, and the wealth of life-support
to be generated by expediting or slowing the physical resource
interactions with humanity's available time to work the resources into
higher advantage tools, environment controlling devices, and
metabolically regenerative sustainers.

 

Throughout all the two million years up to the Twentieth Century,
the total distance covered by an average man in an average lifetime
disclosed to him less than one-millionth of the surface of our
spherical planet. So tiny was a human and so relatively large is our
planet that it is not surprising that humans as yet cerebrate only in
terms of a "wide, wide world— a four-cornered Earth," situated in the
middle of an infinite plane, to which all the perpendiculars are
parallel to one another and lead only in two directions— UP and
DOWN— with sky UP there and earth DOWN here. Don't think it is
only an illiterate unemployee who is misoriented and ignorant; even
now the senses and brains of all the Ph.D. scientists are so
reflexively misoriented that they too see the sun go down, plunging
into the infinite plane at a mysterious and never-discovered place
called the West, to rise mysteriously from it again next morning at a
never-identified place called East— and Astronaut Conrad bursts out
spontaneously from his moon advantage talking about being " … up
here on the moon..." and the President of the United States
congratulates the astronauts on "...going up to the moon and back
down to earth." Scientists not only admit but assert that there are no
locales in the Universe to be identified as UP and DOWN. None of

 

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18 Expanded Cinema

 

the perpendiculars to our spherical Earth's surface are parallel to one
another; they lead in an infinity of directions.

 

No matter how you may look upon the matter morally and
ideologically, the assumption that humanity could or could not own a
piece of land with all the earth vertically below it and all the air
vertically above it is not only scientifically invalid— it is scientifically
impossible. The scheme is geometrically possible only as an up-anddown
make-believe flat world.

 

To understand the scientific impossibility of such a scheme, let us
consider a cube inside of a sphere, with the cube's eight corners
congruent with the surface of the sphere. Let the cube's twelve edges
consist of steel structurals. A light is at the common center of the
cube and sphere and casts a shadow of the twelve structural edges
of the cube outwardly upon the surface of the translucent sphere. We
will now see that the total spherical surface is divided symmetrically
by great circle arcs into six equilateral four-edged areas. Though
each of the four-sided symmetrical areas has 120-degree corners
instead of 90-degree corners, each is called a spherical square.
Altogether they constitute a spherical cube.

 

We will now suppose the spherical cube to be the planet Earth.
We will suppose that war and treaties have resulted in the total
Earth's being divided equally amongst six sovereign groups— each
empowered by its laws to grant deeds to properties within their
respective spherical square surfaces on the planet, regardless of
whether covered by water or not. We will suppose that, as at
present, each of the world's major sovereign nations assumes the
authority to deed or lease the titles to subdivisions of each of their
respective lands to corporations, sub-governments, and individuals.
All the legally recognized deeds to property anywhere around our
Earth date back only to sovereign claims established and maintained
exclusively by military might.

 

Now that we have the model of a cubical subdivision of the
sphere, let us color our cube's six faces, respectively, red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, and violet. Let Russia sovereignly possess the
red face of the cube. Consider all the perpendiculars to the red face
of the internally positioned cube as being the up and down perpendiculars
defining the property claims to all the land below the surface

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 19

 

and all the air above the surface. Under these conditions, it will be
seen that the red square owns all the interior of the cube which
occurs perpendicularly below that red surface square. Therefore,
each of the six countries would be claiming exclusive possession of
the same "whole" cube, which obviously invalidates each and all of
their claims to only one-sixth of the cube. This realization is mildly
reminiscent of Portia's admonition to Shylock that he must be able to
cut loose his pound of flesh without letting a drop of blood.

 

"Alright," you say, "I will concede it is impossible to demonstrate
the validity of the claims to the lands lying perpendicularly below my
surface map without invalidating all other land owners of the world.
Therefore, I will try to live on the surface of my land and just claim it
and the air space vertically above me." "Alright," we say to you,
"what air are you talking about, because it just blew away." You retort
testily, "I don't mean that nonsense... just the air geometrically above
me. That is what I refer to when I say you are violating my air
space— you are violating my overhead geometry." "Alright," we say
to you, "which stars were you looking at when you said, '...that space
above me'? Our Earth has been revolved away from those stars.
Other stars are now above us. Not only are we revolving, but we are
simultaneously orbiting around the sun, while all the planets and
stars are always in swift motion, but are so far away from us and our
lives so short that we are unable to perceive those motions. The
distances involved are so great that the light from the next star to the
sun takes four and one-half years to come to our solar system while
traveling 700 million miles per hour and the distance across our
galaxy is more than 300,000 light years, while the next nearest of the
millions of galaxies are multi-millions of light years away from our
galactic nebula. With those kinds of distances in the heavens, the
amount of star motion that you and I can detect in our lifetime is
humanly unrecognizable. Most of the star speeds within their
galaxies are in the order of only 100,000 miles per hour, which is a
negligible speed beside light's speed of 700 million miles per hour."

 

Because all the stars in the Universe are in motion, our planet
orbits rotatingly in an ever-changing, omni-circus of celestial
events.There is no static geometry of omni-interrelationship of Uni

 

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20 Expanded Cinema

 

verse events. Some of the stars you are looking at have not been
there for a million years— Some no longer exist. As Einstein and
Planck discovered, "Universe is a scenario of non-simultaneous and
only partially overlapping, transformative events." One frame in the
scenario of caterpillar does not foretell the later scenario event of its
transformation into butterfly. One frame of butterfly cannot tell you
that the butterfly flies; only large time-sequence segments of the
scenario can provide meaningful information. Cogitating on the
myriads of stars apparently scattered in disorderly spherical array
about the heavens, individuals often remark, as may you, "I wonder
what is outside outside?"— asking for a one-frame answer, which is
as unintelligent as asking, "Which word is the dictionary?" You know
the order of the dictionary to be alphabetical, but its words do not
read sequentially. Just hearing them read aloud, they make an only
apparent, disorderly array. This is typical of the manner in which
nature hides her orderliness in only apparent disorder.

 

Back to little Space Vehicle Earth and that question of property.
The most that the individual could be entitled to own would be the
inside of an infinitely thin blueprint of his land, because there is no
geometry of space outside it and no exclusively occupiable land
below. Our planet Earth is the home of all humans, but scientifically
speaking it belongs only to Universe. It belongs equally to all
humans. This is the natural, geometrical law. Any laws of man which
contradict nature are unenforceable and specious.

 

Without the infinitely-extended lateral plane, the words up and
down are meaningless. The airman initiated the correct descriptive
terms "coming IN for a landing and going OUT." It is meaningful to
say "INSTAIRS and OUTSTAIRS." Say it for a week and your
senses will discover and notify that you are living on a planet.

 

What do you mean, "astronaut?" We are all astronauts. Always
have been— but really! Never mind your "Never-mind-that-spacestuff,
let's-be-practical, let's-get-down-to-Earth" talk— brain-talk as
undisturbed by knowledge as is a parrot's brain-talk by any
awareness born of thought. Brain is physical— weighable; thought is
metaphysical— weightless. Many creatures have brains. Man alone
has mind. Parrots cannot do algebra; only mind can abstract. Brains
are physical devices for storing and retrieving special case experi

 

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Introduction 21

 

ence data. Mind alone can discover and employ the generalized
scientific principles found holding true in every special case
experience.

 

Universe has disclosed to astrophysics an elegantly orderly
inventory of ninety-two regenerative chemical elements, each with its
unique behaviors, all of which are essential to the success of
Universe. All are in continual interexchange within the total
evolutionary process of Universe. Ignorant humans aboard Space
Vehicle Earth are now screaming, "Pollution!" There is no such
phenomenon. What they call pollution is extraordinarily valuable
chemistry essential to Universe and essential to man on Earth. What
is happening is that the egocentricity of omni-specialized man makes
him ignorant of the value with which his processing is confronting
him. The yellow-brown content of fume and smog is mostly sulphur.
The amount of sulphur going out of the smokestacks around the
world each year is exactly the same as the amount of sulphur being
taken from the Earth each year to keep the world ecology going. It
would be far less expensive to catch that sulphur while concentrated
in the stack, and to distribute it to the original users, than to do the
original mining AND to get it out of human lungs, et cetera, when all
the costs to society over a deteriorating twenty-five years are taken
into account. But humanity insists on holding to this year's profits,
crops, and elections. World society is lethally shortsighted.

 

Subconsciously reflexing to the as yet mistaken concept of an
infinite plane, men have felt that they could dispose of annoyingly
accruing substances with which they did not know how to deal by
dispatching them outward in some cosmic direction, assumedly to be
diffused innocuously in infinity. "I spit in the ocean. So what?"
Humans as yet cerebrate secretly and hopefully that— inasmuch as
yesterday's exhaustion of customary resources has always been
followed by discovery of alternate and better resources— the great
infinity is going to keep right on taking care of ignorant carelessness
and waste. "So what the hell?" say the "down-to-earth" statusquoers.
"Pump all the fossil fuel energy-depositing of billions of years
out from the Earth's crust. Burn it up in a century. Fill all your bank
accounts with ten-place figures. To hell with the great grandchildren.
Let them burn up our Space Vehicle Earth's oceans with hydrogen

 

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22 Expanded Cinema

 

fusion. Let them do the worrying about tomorrow."

 

Just as biological protoplasmic cells are colonized into larger
organisms, the most complex and omni-adaptable of which is the
human, so too do humans colonize and inventively externalize the
same organic tool functions for their mutual metabolic regeneration.
We call this complex mutual tool externalization by the name
industrialization, in which each of us can use the telephone or the
electric light in our special, unique tasks, all of which require
increasing development of worldaround access to the total resources
and worldaround distribution of the advantages comprehensively
produced in total metabolic regeneration.

 

The world population which, after the cell-colonizing within its
controlled environment, has been emitted from the thin,
protoplasmic, tissue-sheathed, human womb into planet Earth's
larger biosphere-sheathed, industrial organism womb, goes on
colonizing, integrating, and specializing locally as innocently and
ignorantly as did the protoplasmic cells within the woman's womb, all
the while mistrusting one another as they evolve their utter
interdependence around Earth, as do the individual protoplasmic
cells of the residents of human Wombland gather together
selectively, finally to form a whole child. In due course, we will
realize a one world human integrity and with each degree of physical
integration a new degree of metaphysical freedom will be attained.

 

Earthians in their more roomy biosphere are as yet provided-for,
despite their utter ignorance of the infinitely-exquisite reliable
interactions of cosmic mechanics. Mothers don't have to invent a
breast to feed the baby or invent oxygen for it to breathe. Nor do they
have to tell the child how to invent its cell growth. Humans are utterly
ignorant of what goes on, how, and why.

 

The Universe is a self-regenerating and transforming organic
machine. Human womb graduates now gestating within the
biosphere's world industrial organism womb are discovering and
employing a few of the principles governing micro-macro cosmic
mechanics, all the while ignorantly speaking of their accomplishments
of the generally-disregarded obvious as "inventions" and
"creations." Now humans have become suspicious of their little
machines, blaming them for the continual disconnects of the

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 23

 

inexorable evolutionary processes of cosmic gestations which—
transcendental to their brain detecting— ever and again emit them
into a greater, more inclusively exquisite spherical environment of
automated mechanical controls that progressively decontrol humanity's
thought and action capabilities— ever increasing humanity's
options— emancipating it from its former almost total preoccupation
with absolute survival factors.

 

Assuming erroneously that their day-to-day positive experiences
should be rendered perpetual and their negative experiences
eliminated, humans try to freeze the unfreezable evolution at specific
stages. They try to make "plastic flowers" of all momentarily
satisfying events and paraphernalia. In the past, they tried to do it
with stone. Separated from the familiar, confronted with the
unfamiliar, and reflexed only by the brain's mechanical feedback,
unthinking humans— not realizing that there are no straight lines, only
wavy ones, and not realizing that waves can only be propagated by
positive-negative oscillating— find their straight linear strivings
forever frustrated by the wave system realities of Universe.
Ignorantly they speak of the evolutionary waves' regeneratively
oscillating complementaries as "good" and "bad," though the
scientist can find no such moral and immoral qualities in the electron
or its complementary opposite, the positron.

 

Humanity as a whole is indeed being emitted from a two-millionyear
gestation within the womb of permitted ignorance, for which
infantile period cosmic mechanics have been making ample
provision not only to offset ignorance and waste but also to permit
humanity's gradual trial-and-error experimental discovery of the
relatively negligible effectiveness of its muscle— which it had at first
employed not only exclusively but savagely— and the concomitant
discovery of the infinite apprehending and comprehending
effectiveness of the human mind, which alone can discover and
employ the Universal verities— and thereby realize comprehensively
the potential, progressive, non-wasteful, competent, considerate
mastery of the physical environment by the metaphysical intellect.

 

The metaphysical integrities manifest throughout the everywhere
inter-transforming Universe's omni-inter-accommodative cosmic
organic system apparently are from time-to-time emulated in meager
degree by the intellect of the human passengers who are gestating

 

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24 Expanded Cinema

 

within the spherical womb sheath of planet Earth's watery, gaseous,
and electro-magnetic biosphere.

 

Humanity's most recent sorties to the moon from within Space
Vehicle Earth's womb-like biosphere sheath have been tantamount
to a premature, temporary surgical removal of a baby from its human
mother's womb, skillfully enclosed within a scientifically-controlled
environment, still attached to the mother, and after successful
surgery being returned into the human mother's womb to loll-out its
remaining gestation days to the successful detached-action launching
outwards in Universe which we ignorantly identify as "birth."
Sovereign nation "landing cards" require answers to ridiculous
questions: "When were you born?" "Where do you live?" Answer: "I
am immortal. I check in here and there from celestial-time-tocelestial-
time. Right now I am a passenger on Space Vehicle Earth
zooming about the Sun at 60,000 miles per hour somewhere in the
solar system, which is God-only-knows where in the scenario
Universe. Why do you ask?"

 

Humanity's sorties to the moon have been accomplished only
through instrumental guidance of their controlled-environment
capsules and mechanical-enclosure clothing by utterly invisible
electromagnetic wave phenomena referenced to instrument-aligned
star bearings, with the invisible mathematical integrations accomplished
by computers, uncorrupted and incorruptible by ignorantly
opinionated humans. Thus has man been advantaged by the few
who have thought and acted to produce the instruments, as yet
relieving the vast majority of humans from the necessity of having to
think and coordinate their sensings with the realities of cosmic
mechanics.

 

Humans still think in terms of an entirely superficial game of static
things— solids, surfaces, or straight lines— despite that no things— no
continuums— only discontinuous, energy quanta— separate event
packages— operate as remotely from one another as the stars of the
Milky Way. Science has found no "things"; only events. Universe has
no nouns; only verbs. Don't say self-comfortingly to yourself or to me
that you have found the old way of getting along with false notions to
be quite adequate and satisfactory. So was the old umbilical cord to
your mother. But you can't re-attach it and your mother is no longer
physically present. You can't go back. You can't stay put. You can

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 25

 

only grow and, if you comprehend what is going on, you will find it
ever more satisfactory and fascinating, for that is what evolution is
doing, whether you think, ignorantly, that you don't like it or do.

 

To each human being, environment is "all of Universe that isn't
me." Our macrocosmic and microcosmic "isn't me-ness" consists
entirely of widely dissynchronous frequencies of repetitions of
angular changes and complex inter-actions of waves of different
lengths and frequencies of repetition. Physics has found a Universe
consisting only of frequency and angle modulations.

 

Our environment is a complex of frequencies and angles. Our
environment is a complex of different frequencies of impingement—
from within and without— upon the individual "me-nesses." We are in
a womb of complex frequencies. Some of those frequencies man
identifies ignorantly with such words as "sight, sound, touch, and
smell." Others he calls "tornadoes, earthquakes, novae." Some he
ignorantly looks upon as static things: houses, rocks, and human-like
manikins.

 

Very, very slow changes humans identify as inanimate. Slow
change of pattern they call animate and natural. Fast changes they
call explosive, and faster events than that humans cannot sense
directly. They can see the rocket blasted off at 7,000 miles per hour.
They cannot see the hundred-thousand times faster radar pulse
moving 700 million miles per hour. Humans can sense only the
position of pointers on instrument dials. What they call "radio"—
electro-magnetics— they learn of through scientific instrumentation.
Of the total electro-mechanical spectrum range of the now known
realities of Universe, man has the sensory equipment to tune in
directly with but one-millionth of the thus far discovered physical
Universe events. Awareness of all the rest of the million-fold
greater-than-human-sense reality can only be relayed to human ken
through instruments, devised by a handful of thought-employing
individuals anticipating thoughtfully the looming needs of others.

 

The almost totally invisible, nonsensorial, electro-magnetic
womb-sheath of environmental evolution's reality-phase into which
humanity is now being born— after two million years of ignorant,
innocent gestation— is as yet almost entirely uncomprehended by
humanity. 99.9 per cent of all that is now transpiring in human activity

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

26 Expanded Cinema

 

and interaction with nature is taking place within the realms of reality
which are utterly invisible, inaudible, unsmellable, untouchable by
human senses. But the invisible reality has its own behavioral rules
which are entirely transcendental to man-made laws and evaluation
limitations. The invisible reality's integrities are infinitely reliable. It
can only be comprehended by metaphysical mind, guided by
bearings toward something sensed as truth. Only metaphysical mind
can communicate. Brain is only an information storing and retrieving
instrument. Telephones cannot communicate; only the humans who
use the instruments. Man is metaphysical mind. No mind— no
communication— no man. Physical transactions without mind— YES.
Communication— NO. Man is a self-contained, micro-communicating
system. Humanity is a macro-communicating system. Universe is a
serial communicating system; a scenario of only partially
overlapping, nonsimultaneous, irreversible, transformative events.

 

As yet preoccupied only with visible, static, newspicture views of
superficial surfaces of people and things— with a one-millionth
fraction of reality which it has cartooned in utter falsehood— society
fails to realize that several hundred thousand radio or TV
communications are at all times invisibly present everywhere around
our planet. They permeate every room in every building— passing
right through walls and human tissue. This is to say that the stone
walls and human tissue are invisible and nonexistent to the electromagnetic
wave reality. We only deceived ourselves into reflexing
that the walls are solid. How do you see through your solid
eyeglasses? They are not full of holes. They are aggregates of
atoms as remote from one another as are the stars. There's plenty of
space for the waves of light to penetrate.

 

Several hundred thousand different wide-band radio sets can at
any time be tuned in anywhere around our biosphere to as many
different communications. Going right through our heads now, these
programs could be tuned in by the right crystals and circuits. Crystals
and circuits consist of logically structured atomic arrays. Such arrays
could operate even within our brains. Tiny bats fly in the dark by
locating objects ahead in their flight path by ever more minuscule
radar sending and receiving, distance-to-object calculating
mechanisms. Right this minute, five hundred Earth-launched satellit

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 27

 

es with sensors are reporting all phenomena situated about our
planet's surface. Tune in the right wavelength and learn where every
beef cattle or every cloud is located around the Earth. All that
information is now being broadcast continually and invisibly.

 

For humans to have within their cerebral mechanism the proper
atomic radio transceivers to carry on telepathetic communication is
no more incredible than the transistors which were invented only two
decades ago, and far less incredible than the containment of the
bat's radar and range-finding computer within its pin-point size brain.
There is nothing in the scientific data which says the following
thoughts are impossible and there is much in the data which
suggests that they are probable. The thoughts go as follows: The
light of a candle broadcasting its radiation in all directions can be
seen no farther than a mile away in clear atmosphere. When the
same candle's flame is placed close in to the focus of a parabolic
reflector and its rays are even further concentrated into a beam by a
Freznell lens, its light can be seen at ten miles distance. The earliest
lighthouses were furnished with such reflectively concentrated beam
lights of tiny oil lamps.

 

What we speak of as light is a limited set of frequencies of the
vast electro-magnetic wave ranges. All electro-magnetic waves can
be beamed as well as broadcast. When beamed and lensingly
concentrated (as with the laser beams refracted through rubies), their
energies are so concentrated as to be able to bore tunnels in
mountains. The shorter the waves, the smaller the reflector and
refractor may be.

 

We know that the human has never seen outside himself. Electromagnetic
waves of light bounce off objects outside him and
frequencies are picked up by the human eyes and scanningly relayed
back into the brain. Because the light is so much faster than touch,
smell, and hearing, men have tended to discount the billionth of a
second it takes light to bounce off one's hand and to get the
information back into one's brain. All sensing is done by humans
entirely inside the brain, with information nerve-relayed from the
external contact receivers. The human brain is like a major television
studio-station. Not only does the brain monitor all the incoming, live,
visible, audible, smellable, and touchable 3D shows, it also makes

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

28 Expanded Cinema

 

videotapes of the incoming news, continually recalls yesterday's
relevant documentaries and compares them with incoming news to
differentiate out the discovered new and unexpected events from the
long-familiar types, and to discover the implications of the news from
those previously-experienced similar events, in order swiftly to
design new scenarios of further actions logically to be taken in
respect to the newly-evolved challenges.

 

So faithful has been the 4D, omni-directional, image-ination within
the human omni-sense transceiving studio-stations of human brains
that the humans themselves long ago came to assume
spontaneously that the information received inside the brain made it
safe to presume that those events were, in fact, taking place outside
and remote from the seeing human individual. The reliability of all
this imagining has been so constant that he now tends to think he
sees only outside himself.

 

The shorter the electro-magnetic, air, water, sand, or rocky
earthquake wavelengths, the higher their frequency. The higher the
wave frequencies, the more the possibility of their interfering with
other high-frequency, physical phenomena such as walls, trees,
mountains. The nearer they approach the same frequencies, the less
do they interfere with one another. For this reason, the very high-
frequency electro-magnetic waves of radio and television get badly
deflected by obstacles. As a consequence, man learned to beam
short wave television programs from horizon to horizon. He
developed parabolic transceiver reflectioning cups that took in and
sent out waves in parallel beam-focused rays. At the transceiver
relay stations on the horizons, additional energy is fed into the
signals received and their projection power is boosted so that, when
they arrive at final destination after many relayings, their fidelity and
power are as yet exquisitely differentiated and clearly resonated.

 

It may well be that human eyes are just such infra-sized parabolic
transceiver cups. It may be that our transceiver eyes adequately

 

accommodate the extraordinarily low magnitude of energy
propagating of the brain as electromagnetic
wave pattern
oscillations to be picked up by others.

 

Early photography required whole minutes of exposure. As film
chemistry improved, exposure times decreased. Yesterday, one-
thousandth of a second was fast. Today's capability makes one

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 29

 

millionth of a second a relatively slow electro-astrophotography
exposure. Pictures taken in a millionth of a second today are clearer
than those of yesterday which took minutes. The scanned-out picture
signals travel 700 million miles per hour. The effect in terms of man's
tactile, hearing, and smelling senses is instantaneous.

 

Speakers who appear frequently before large audiences of
human beings over a period of years have learned that the eyes of
the audience "talk back" so instantaneously to them that they know
just what their audiences are thinking and they can converse with
their audiences, even though the speaker seems to be the only one
making audible words. The feedback by eye is so swift as to give
him instantaneous, spontaneous reaction and appropriate thought
formulation.

 

The parabolic reflector-beamed, ultra-ultra high frequency,
electro-magnetic waves— such as can be coped with by transceivers
with the infra-diameter of the human eye— are such that they would
be completely interfered with by walls or other to-us-seeminglyopaque
objects. However, when they are beamed outwardly to the
sky in a cloudless atmosphere, no interference occurs. Ultra short
wave radio and radar beams which are interfered with by mountains
and trees can be beamed into a clear sky and bounced off the moon,
to be received back on Earth in approximately one and three-fourths
seconds. In a like manner, it is possible that human eyes operating
as transceivers, all unbeknownst to us, may be beaming our thoughts
out into the great night-sky void, not even having the sun's radiation
to interfere mildly with them. Such eye-beamed thoughts sent off
through the inter-celestial voids might bounce off various objects at
varying time periods, being reflectively re-angled to a new direction
in Universe without important energy loss. A sufficient number of
bouncings-off of a sufficient number of asteroids and cosmic dust
could convert the beams into wide-angle sprays which diffuse their
energy signals in so many angular directions as to reduce them
below receptor-detection level. Eye-beamed thoughts might bounce
off objects so remote as to delay their 700 million mile per hour
travel back to Earth for a thousand years, ten thousand years, a
hundred thousand years. It is quite possible that thoughts may be
eye-beamed outwardly not only from Earth to bounce back to Earth
at some later period from some celestially-mirroring object, but

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

30 Expanded Cinema

 

also that thoughts might be beamed— through non-interfering space
to be accidentally received upon Earth— from other planets
elsewhere in Universe. There is nothing in the data to suggest that
the phenomenon we speak of as intuitive thought may not be just
such remote cosmic transmissions. Intuitions come to us often with
surprising lucidity and abruptness. Such intuitions often spotlight
significant coincidences in a myriad of special case experiences
which lead to discovery of generalized scientific principles heretofore
eluding humanity's thought. These intuitions could be messages to
the Earthian brain receiving it to "Look into so-and-so and so-and-so
and you will find something significant." Intuitions could be thoughts
dispatched from unbelievably long ago and from unbelievably far
away.

 

As Holton wrote in the American Journal of Physics and as
reported on the "Science" page of Time magazine, January 26, 1970:

 

To fully recognize the extraordinary intellectual daring of Einstein's equations,
we note the great scientist’s own explanation of their origin: "There is no logical
way to the discovery of these elementary laws. There is only the way of
intuition."

 

Because humans consist of a myriad of atoms and because atoms
are themselves electro-magnetic frequency event phenomena— not
things— it is theoretically possible that the complex frequencies of
which humans are constituted, together with their angular interpositioning,
could be scanningly unraveled and transmitted beam-
wise into the celestial void to be received some time, somewhere in
Universe, having traveled at 700 million miles per hour, which is
approximately 100 thousand times faster than the speed of our moon
rockets a minute after blast-off. It is not theoretically impossible in
terms of the total physical data that humans may have been
transmitted to Earth in the past from vast distances.

 

Retreating from such a speculative mood, we come now to
consider closer-range possibilities and probabilities. We recall that
humans, who to our knowledge arrived on Earth at least two million
years ago, have been regenerating aboard that small, 8000-mile
diameter, Space Vehicle Earth throughout all those years without
even knowing that they were aboard a space vehicle. They are now

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 31

 

emerging, however, from the womb of permitted ignorance of their
early, subjective, taken-care-of phase and are now beginning to
become comprehensively aware of all the matters we have
discussed so far. They are beginning to understand that they are
within a limited biosphere life-support system whose original
excessively-abundant living supply was provided only to permit
humanity's initial trial-and-error discovery of its anti-entropic function
in Universe. Humans are coming swiftly to understand they must now
consciously begin to operate their Space Vehicle Earth with total
planetary cooperation, competence, and integrity. Humans are
swiftly sensing that the cushioning tolerance for their initial error has
become approximately exhausted.

 

Each child emerging from its mother's womb is entering a larger
womb of total human consciousness which is continually modified
and expanded by subjective experiences and objective experiments.
As each successive child is born, it comes into a cosmic
consciousness in which it is confronted with less misinformation than
yesterday and with more reliable information than yesterday. Each
child is born into a much larger womb of more intellectually
competent consciousness.

 

I was seven years old before I saw an automobile, though living in
the ambience of a large American city. Not until I was nine was the
airplane invented. As a child I thought spontaneously only in terms of
walking, bicycling, horse-drawn capability. Trips on railroads and
steamships were dream-provokers learned of through a few older
people who traveled. My daughter was born with cloth-covered-wing
bi-planes in her sky and the talkie radio in her hearing. My
granddaughter was born in a house with several jet transports going
over every minute. She saw a thousand airplanes before she saw a
bird; a thousand automobiles before a horse. To children born in
1970, trips to the moon will be as everyday an event as were trips
into the big city to me when a boy. There was no radio when I was
born. Television came when I was what is called "retiring age." The
first Berkeley dissident students were born the year commercial
television started. They have seen around the world on the hour ever
since being born— they think world. The total distance covered by an
average human being in a total lifetime up to the time I was born was
30,000 miles. Because of the great changes since my birth, I have

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

32 Expanded Cinema

 

now gone well over one hundred times that distance. The astronauts
knock off three million miles in a week. The average airline hostess
is out-mileaging my hundred-fold greater mileage than all the people
before me. All this has happened in my lifetime. My lifetime has been
one of emerging from the womb of human-being remoteness from
one another to comprehensive integration of worldaround humanity.
But all the customs, all the languages, all laws, all accounting
systems, viewpoints, cliches, and axioms are of the old, divided,
ignorant days. The corollary of "divide and conquer" is "to be divided
is to be conquered." To be specialized is to be divided. The
specialization which humanity perseveres in was invented by
yesterday's armed conqueror illiterates. The separation of humans
into more countries made them easy to manage. Nations may unite,
as at present, without success. Strife is proliferating. Not until
specialization and nations are dispensed with will humanity have a
chance of survival. It is to be all or none.

 

In my first jobs before World War I, I found all the working men to
have vocabularies of no more than one hundred words, more than 50
per cent of which were profane or obscene. Because I worked with
them, I know that their intellects were there, but dulled and deprived
of the information of visionary conceptioning. They had no way of
expressing themselves other than by inflection and shock.
Conquerors invented gladiatorial wrestling, self-brutalizing games,
slapstick and illusionary drama to keep their illiterate masses
preoccupied when not at work. This was not changed by any
scheduled system of education— it was changed by the radio. The
radio broadcasting employees were hired for their vocabularies and
diction. The eyes and ears of human beings were able to coordinate
the words of the radio and the graphic words of the newspaper.
Literacy accelerated. In a half-century, worldaround man's vocabulary
has been expanded to the equivalent of yesterday's scholar.
Television's scientific invention and underwater and space exploration
have accelerated this process of freeing humanity from its slave
complex to an extraordinary degree. The young realize, as their
elders do not, that humanity can do and can afford to do anything it
needs to do that it knows how to do.

 

Those who ignorantly think of themselves as a well-to-do conservative
elite are, in fact, so slave-complexed that they are shocked

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 33

 

when the younger generation throws aside their clothes and cars of
distinction and— abandoning their make-believe mansions which only
are their old conquerors' castles— congregate in hundreds of
thousands in shameless, innocent bands on vast beaches and
meadows. It is not an unspannable generation gap that has occurred,
but an emancipation of youth from yesterday's slave-complex
reflexes. This has been brought about solely by the proliferation of
knowledge. "The medium is the message" is the message only of
yesterday's middle-class elite. It said, "Never mind the mind. It's the
body that counts." or "It's the physical that can be possessed— To
hell with the metaphysical. You can possess a physical brain but not
the universally free mind and its thoughts. Leave that to the
intellectuals. Look out for those dangerous free thinkers." Higher
education was an adornment— a mark of distinction— not something
to be taken seriously. The problem of man's being born into the new
womb of planetary comprehension, into the new world of integrated
coordination and understanding of all humanity, is one not of
educating a single absolute monarch, nor of educating either a
fascistic or central party elite, nor of educating only the middle class.
It is a matter of educating everyone everywhere to the realities of the
emerging of man from the womb of permitted ignorance into the
womb of required comprehension and competence. That education
will have to be brought about by the extraordinary discarding of
yesterday's inadequate amusements, shallow romances and drama,
and make-believe substitute worlds to cover up the inadequacies of
misinformed and underinformed, physically slavish or
bureaucratically dogmatic, thoughtless life.

 

All the foregoing observations of human misorientations constitute
but a minor fraction of those which can be truthfully and cogently
made today with some chance of their not only being heard but
heeded. And all this brings us all to this book by Gene Youngblood—
an excellent name for one of the first of the youth who have emerged
from childhood and schooling and "social experience" sufficiently
undamaged to be able to cope lucidly with the problem of providing
worldaround man with the most effective communication techniques
for speaking universal language to universal man— for helping
universal man to understand the great transitions, to understand the

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

34 Expanded Cinema

 

reasonableness of yesterday's only-transitional inadequacies, to
understand that the oldsters are victims of yesterday's ignorance and
not Machiavellian enemies of youth, to understand that any bias—
one way or another— utterly vitiates competent thinking and action, to
understand that 100 per cent tolerance for error of viewpoint and
misbehavior of others is essential to new-era competence— and,
finally, to understand that man wants to understand. Nowhere have
we encountered a youth more orderly-minded regarding the most
comprehensively favorable, forward functioning of humans in
Scenario-Universe than in Gene Youngblood. His book Expanded
Cinema is his own name for the forward, omni-humanity educating
function of man's total communication system.

 

Isaac Newton, as the greatest Olympian of classical science
whose influence reigned supreme until the turn of the Nineteenth into
the Twentieth Century, assumed the Universe to be normally at rest
and abnormally in motion. Einstein realized that the experimental
data regarding the Brownian Movement and the speed of light made
it clear that Universe was not normally at rest, for when its energies
were released in a vacuumized tunnel they traveled linearly at 186
million miles per second. This he assumed to manifest its norm,
since that is how Universe behaves normally when unfettered in a
vacuum. Any seemingly motionless phenomena, he reasoned, such
as seemingly solid matter, consisted of energy moving at 186 million
miles per second but in such small local orbits that their speed and
the exquisitely small, self-huddling orbit made them impenetrable;
ergo, apparently solid. This was the basis of his formulation of his
extraordinary E=mc2, which, when fission and fusion occurred,
proved his locked-up-energy formulation to be correct. The utter
difference between Newton's norm of at rest and Einstein's norm of
186 million miles per second provides humanity's most abrupt
confrontation regarding the epochal difference of conceptioning
between that in the womb of yesterday's ignorance and in the womb
of new-dawning awareness, from which and into which, respectively,
man is now experiencing the last phases of delivery.

 

Thinking in terms of 700 million miles per hour as being normal—
and informed by the experiments of scientists that no energies are

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Introduction 35

 

lost— Einstein abandoned the Newtonian thought of Universe and
assumed in its place Universe to be "A scenario of non-simultaneous
and only partially overlapping transformative events." Einstein's
observational formulations, however, are subjective, not objective. In
the mid-1930's I suggested in a book that Einstein's work would
eventually affect the everyday environment of humanity, both
physically and mentally. After reading what I had written, Einstein
said to me, "Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive of
anything I have ever done as having the slightest practical
application." He said that to me a year before Hahn, Stressman, and
Lisa Meitner had, on the basis of E=mc2 , discovered the theoretical
possibility of fission. You can imagine Einstein's dismay when
Hiroshima became the first "practical application."

 

Gene Youngblood's book is the most brilliant conceptioning of the
objectively positive use of the Scenario-Universe principle, which
must be employed by humanity to synchronize its senses and its
knowledge in time to ensure the continuance of that little, threeand-
one-half-billion-member team of humanity now installed by
evolution aboard our little Space Vehicle Earth. Gene Youngblood's
book represents the most important metaphysical scenario for coping
with all of the ills of educational systems based only on yesterday's
Newtonian-type thinking. Youngblood's Expanded Cinema is the
beginning of the new era educational system itself. Tomorrow's youth
will employ the video cassette resources to bring in the scenario
documents of all of humanity's most capable thinkers and
conceivers. Only through the scenario can man possibly "houseclean"
swiftly enough the conceptual resources of his spontaneous
formulations. Tomorrow's Expanded Cinema University, as the word
uni-verse— towards one— implies, will weld metaphysically together
the world community of man by the flux of understanding and the
spontaneously truthful integrity of the child.

 

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
ARTSCILAB 2001

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Inexorable Evolution
and Human Ecology

 

Until humanity starts behaving
In logical ways
For logical reasons
Natural evolution will force it
To keep on behaving logically
For seemingly illogical reasons—
Resulting inexorably, as at present,
In humanity's backing
Rump-bumpingly into its future
While disregarding opportunities
To about-face and realize
Its inspiring passengership
Aboard Planet Earth—
As its exploratory mothership
Of ever vaster and more exquisite
Macro- and micro-cosmic realms.
And the frustrations
Of fearfully clung-to customs
Will persist unabated until
Humanity undertakes
Seriously, imaginatively,
Courageously, inspiringly
To employ effectively
The ever-more with ever less—
Of effort, material, time
And tolerance of error
Per each accomplished task
The comprehensively anticipatory
Design science revolution—
Being intent thereby
To make all of humanity
Successful in every sense.
As it undertakes design revolution
37

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

38 Expanded Cinema

 

Humanity also must realize
That it can always afford rearrangements
Of the physical environment constituents
Which produce sustainable increases
In the proportion of all of humanity
Enjoying comprehensive success—
Provided only the task
Is physically feasible
Within ecologically critical limits
Of electro-magnetics, chemistry, time.
"We cannot afford" assumes spending
Intertransforming as matter or radiation
Energy cannot be spent
Know-how always increases
Wealth multiplies irreversibly.
And not until then will nature
Cease to cope with humanity's
Ignorance-prolonged inertia
Just in the same way
That human parents
Cope with their newborns'
Innocently ignorant
Self-helplessness—
And that is by forcing man
To acquire the adequate technology
With which ultimately
To attain and sustain
That potential omni-success.
And until then it will be accomplished inversely—
Through activating humanity's
Death fearing instincts.
Fear forcing it to acquire
The adequate production-tool complex
As a consequence of inducing humanity
Into an investment and reinvestment
Of its best capabilities and resources
Only in preparation for war.
This inverse procedure will regenerate

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology 39

 

To ever higher degree
Both the more-with-less energy processing
And its production equipment.
And when man learns, if he does
To initiate the more-with-lessing
Under peacefully purposed auspices
Peace then will be attained
And Universe sustained
But not until then.

 

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
ARTSCILAB 2001

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Preface

 

The question what is life, says Norman O. Brown, turns out to be the
question what is sleep. We perceive that the sky exists only on earth.
Evolution and human nature are mutually exclusive concepts. We're
in transition from the Industrial Age to the Cybernetic Age,
characterized by many as the post-Industrial Age. But I've found the
term Paleocybernetic valuable as a conceptual tool with which to
grasp the significance of our present environment: combining the
primitive potential associated with Paleolithic and the transcendental
integrities of "practical utopianism" associated with Cybernetic. So I
call it the Paleocybernetic Age: an image of a hairy, buckskinned,
barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and
logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated
holograms or krypton laser interferometry. It's the dawn of man: for
the first time in history we'll soon be free enough to discover who we
are.

 

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's a process of becoming, man's
ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his
mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialize in a single
discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its
relationships 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.

 

At this point in the Paleocybernetic Age, the messages of society
as expressed in the intermedia network have become almost totally
irrelevant to the needs and actualities of the organism. The situation
is equivalent to one's own nervous system transmitting erroneous
information about the metabolic and homeostatic condition of one's
own body. It is the primary purpose of this book to explore the new
messages that exist in the cinema, and to examine some of the
image-making technologies that promise to extend man's communicative
capacities beyond his most extravagant visions.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

42 Expanded Cinema

 

We'll begin with a discussion of the individual's relationship to the
contemporary cultural environment in a time of radical evolution, and
the way in which an irresponsible attitude toward the intermedia
network contributes to blind enculturation, confusion, and
disharmony. In the section of Part One titled "Art, Entertainment,
Entropy" I've applied cybernetics and communication theory to the
role of commercial entertainment in our radically evolving
environment. The prevailing messages of the so-called popular
media have lost their relevance because a socioeconomic system
that substitutes the profit motive for use value separates man from
himself and art from life. When we're enslaved to any system, the
creative impulse is dulled and the tendency to imitate increases.
Thus arises the phenomenon of commercial entertainment distinct
from art, a system of temporarily gratifying, without really fulfilling,
the experiential needs of an aesthetically impoverished culture.

 

The mass public insists on entertainment over art in order to
escape an unnatural way of life in which interior realities are not
compatible with exterior realities. Freedom, says Brown, is fusion.
Life becomes art when there's no difference between what we are
and what we do. Art is a synergetic attempt at closing the gap
between what is and what ought to be. Jacob Bronowski has
suggested that we "ought to act in such a way that what is true can
be verified to be so." This characterizes the substance of Part One,
and is why I call it "The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment."

 

Before we can discuss that point at which the cinema requires
some new technological extension we must first follow the history of
conventional film language to its limits: this I have attempted to do in
Part Two, "Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama." The essence
of this chapter is that technology is decentralizing and individualizing
the communication channels of humanity; that personalized
communication means the end of "official" communication structures
such as the genre of drama, resulting in a new "major paradigm" of
cinematic language that I call the synaesthetic mode. Following a
detailed analysis of synaesthetic cinema there's a section titled
"Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass-Audience Age." Here I've
attempted to illuminate some of the social and psychological
potentials inherent in the decentralization of global communications
facilities. The conclusion is that the art and technology of expanded

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Preface 43

 

cinema mean the beginning of creative living for all mankind and
thus a solution to the so-called leisure problem.

 

In Part Three, "Toward Cosmic Consciousness," I discuss various
new realities, primarily the result of scientific developments, which
until recently the artist has not been able to engage in a meaningful
fashion. This chapter also contains a discussion of the "new
nostalgia," a post-Existential view of the human condition. Finally,
I've contrasted two approaches to cinematic cosmic consciousness:
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the small personal
films of the master, Jordan Belson.

 

Two of the most important technologies that will provide access to
the new realities of the Paleocybernetic Age will be discussed in Part
Four, "Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films," and Part Five,
"Television as a Creative Medium." I've attempted to cover these
disciplines as comprehensively as possible, presenting the social,
political, and psychological implications as well as their aesthetic
and technical aspects. Thus the many interviews with artists and
technologists are intended to counterbalance my subjective remarks
and to provide a cross section of attitudes concerning the confluence
of art and technology as it is today and as it will be tomorrow.

 

Part Six, "Intermedia," has more to do with attitude than
technology. The intent here is to illuminate a universal trend toward
the concept of artist as ecologist, art as environment rather than anti-
environment, subsuming the eco-system of our planet itself into the
art process. Finally with Part Seven, "Holographic Cinema," we
arrive at the end that is also a beginning. I've tried to dispel many of
the misconceptions regarding holographic movies, and to delineate
some possibilities. With the perfection of holographic cinema within
the next two decades, we'll arrive at that point in the evolution of
intelligence when the concept of reality no longer will exist. Beyond
that the cinema will be one with the life of the mind, and humanity's
communications will become increasingly metaphysical.

 

Although I've been involved in film criticism since 1960, the major
substance of this book is the result of articles published in different
form in the Los Angeles Free Press from September, 1967, to
December, 1969. That material was rewritten for this text, expanded

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

44 Expanded Cinema

 

and clarified, in addition to the several hundred pages that appear
here for the first time. We are transformed by time through living
within it, so in a sense all of this book is "new" in my work.

 

My indebtedness to the thoughts of R. Buckminster Fuller, John
McHale, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan is quite clear. What
is not so clear is the influence of my friends Edwin Schlossberg, Ted
Zatlyn, and Jon Dieges, all of whose perceptions of humanity as a
whole system are unfettered by the constraints of yesterday's
consciousness. There are portions of this text in which "by Gene
Youngblood" should be taken to mean "by way of Youngblood,
Schlossberg, and Zatlyn." Dieges' influence was less specific, more
general. Charles Brouyette contributed much to the technical aspects
of the chapter on television and I owe him thanks. In ways known to
each of them I am gratefully indebted to Nancy Schiro, Ronald
Nameth, Gerald O'Grady, Tom Ancell, John Margolies, Lawrence
Lipton, Tony Cohan, and my parents Walter and Marie Youngblood
who filled my childhood with the wonder of art. Finally, I wish to
express my thanks to American Airlines for their generous assistance
in the preparation of this book.

 

GENE YOUNGBLOOD
Los Angeles
January, 1970

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

PART ONE:
THE AUDIENCE AND THE MYTH OF
ENTERTAINMENT

 

"The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation,
but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men.
He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and
idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is
just to look at our children."

 

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
As a child of the New Age, for whom "nature" is the solar system and
"reality" is an invisible environment of messages, I am naturally
hypersensitive to the phenomenon of vision. I have come to understand
that all language is but substitute vision and, as Teilhard de
Chardin has observed, "The history of the living world can be
summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a
cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.”1

 

It is that "something more" that has fascinated me since first I
became aware of the limited range of ordinary consciousness,
chiefly as manifested in the cinema. We are witnessing a metamorphosis
in the nature of life on earth. Art, science, and metaphysics,
separated for so long in the specialized world of Western
man, are reconverging; the interface reveals a broader and deeper
reality awaiting our investigation. An increasing number of humans
are beginning to understand that man probably never has perceived
reality at all, because he has not been able to perceive himself. The
realization is not new; only the context is unique: a vast portion of
our culture, free of the conditioning of and nostalgia for past
environments, has intuited something fundamentally inadequate in
prevailing attitudes toward the notion of reality.

 

1Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1959),

 

p. 31.
ARTSCILAB 2001

 

46 Expanded Cinema

 

In most languages of most cultures throughout history, seeing has
been equated with understanding. The entire Indo-European
linguistic system is filled with examples: I see, ya vizhu, je vois. Yet
nearly twenty-four hundred years ago Plato asserted, "The world of
our sight is like the habitation in prison."2 Recent studies in anatomy,
physiology, and anthropology have led to a similar conclusion.3 We
have come to see that we don't really see, that "reality" is more
within than without. The objective and the subjective are one.

 

At the same time, science has taught that there is no purely
physical reason for the disparity between apprehending and
comprehending. We know, for example, that thirty-eight percent of
fibers entering or leaving the central nervous system are in the optic
nerve. It is estimated that as much as seventy-five percent of
information entering the brain is from the eyes. Current research
indicates approximately one hundred million sensors in the retina
and only five million channels to the brain from the retina. There is a
great deal of evidence to suggest that information processing is
done in the eye before data are passed to the brain.4

 

The metaphysical space that separates father and son so
dramatically in what we call the generation gap was manifested on a
global scale on July 20, 1969. In television's elaborate movie-like
subjective-camera "simulation" of the first moon landing, the history
of subjective art with its emphasis on content came into total
confrontation with the history of objective art and its emphasis on
process. As we saw the event, reality was not half as "real" as the
simulation because it was the reality of a process of perception. We
were seeing nothing but videospace; the simulated reality turned out
to be only the reality of a simulation. Objective awareness of a
subjective process was all that mattered, and history's simulation
suddenly became irrelevant. Thousands of years of theatrical

 

2Plato, The Republic, Book VIII, ca. 390 B.C.
3Extensive research on physiological conditioning is found inThe Influence of Culture on
Visual Perception, by Marshall H. Segall, Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J. Herskovits
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
4F. R. Sias, Jr., "The Eye as a Coding Mechanism," Medical Electronic News, quoted in:
Nels Winkless and Paul Honore, "What Good Is a Baby?"Proceedings of the AFIPS
1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment 47

 

tradition were demolished in two hours before an audience of four
hundred million world persons.

 

In the ascending spiral of evolution each new generation absorbs
the experiences of the previous level and expands upon them.
Teilhard has termed this hominization, the process by which the
original protohuman stock becomes increasingly more human, realizing
more of its possibilities. This "consciousness expansion" has
reached a velocity of evolutionary acceleration at which several
transformations occur within the life-span of a single generation.
Because of mankind's inevitable symbiosis with the mind-manifesting
hallucinogens of the ecology on the one hand, and his organic
partnership with machines on the other, an increasing number of the
inhabitants of this planet live virtually in another world. The messages
to be discussed in this book are of that world.

 

It is a world infinitely more natural and complete than that of
commercial cinema or television, which is used to confirm the existing
consciousness rather than to expand it. Art is the language
through which we perceive new relationships at work in the environment,
both physical and metaphysical. Indeed, art is the
essential instrument in the very development of that consciousness.
As Hermann Hesse observed, every important cultural gesture
comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated
into a gesture. Whitehead found it to be "the ultimate morality of the
mind." Perhaps never before has a new model for human behavior
been needed so urgently as today.

 

We who are about to inherit the earth from our fathers will receive
it with a brave new design. We see the whole earth and thus we see
the illusion that has characterized life upon it. We cannot accept the
truths and values of a world in which we no longer live. We are a
generation of desperadoes. We move across the landscape with
bold abandon because we intuit that the birth certificate is the only
credit card. The word "utopian" is not anathema to us because we
know that the illusion can be shattered within our own lifetimes, that
the industrial equation means practical utopianism for the first time in
history.

 

Our grasp of these realities is inarticulate; we cannot speak it. We
are haunted by our own disenchantment and alienation as much as
our parents are offended by it. The human condition, as this millen

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

48 Expanded Cinema

 

nium draws to a close, is one of decreasing intervals between increasing
emergencies until nothing but emergency exists. We have
nothing to lose. Spiritually we have nothing to lose because there is
only sorrow in the values of the past and we have no tears left.
Physically we have nothing to lose because we know that wealth can
neither be created nor spent, that it goes nowhere and always
increases with use.

 

"In this century alone we have gone from less than one percent of
humanity being able to survive in appreciable health and comfort to
forty-four percent of humanity surviving at a standard of living unexperienced
or undreamed of before. This utterly unpredicted synergetic
success occurred within only two-thirds of a century despite
continually decreasing metallic resources per each world person ...
the world total of seventy billion dollars in mined gold represents only
three one-thousandths of one percent of the value of the world's
organized industrial production resources."5

 

Within the larger context of radical evolution there are many local
revolutions. One of them is the revolution of expectations that burns
in the minds of the new consciousness. Eskimo children who've
never seen a wheeled vehicle can identify the types of aircraft flying
over the North Pole. Young Dyaks in the longhouses of equatorial
Borneo listen to the Beatles on transistor radios. Teenage Bedouins
wandering the Sahara hear Nasser's radio telling how Vietnamese
children are being slaughtered half the world away.6

 

Dylan swears he sees his reflection so high above the wall upon
which he once drew conclusions. Seeing that reflection is the
revolution. It tells us old reasons for doing things that no longer exist.
"There's less to do because circumstances do it for us: the earth. Art
has obscured the difference between art and life; now life will
obscure the difference between life and art."7 We no longer need to
prove our right to live. We're struggling in the toil of old realities,

 

5 R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, Ill.:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 82, 95.
6Ritchie Calder, "The Speed of Change,"Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (December,
1965).
7John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1968), pp. 9, 19.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment 49

 

stranded from our conscience, doing our best to deny it. We are
tragically in need of new vision: expanded cinema is the beginning of
that vision. We shall be released. We will bring down the wall. We'll
be reunited with our reflection.

 

I'm writing at the end of the era of cinema as we've known it, the
beginning of an era of image-exchange between man and man. The
cinema, said Godard, is truth twenty-four times a second. The truth
is this: that with the possibility of each man on earth being born a
physical success there is no archetypal Man whom one can use in
the culturally elitist manner and each man becomes the subject of
his own study. The historical preoccupation with finding the one idea
that is Man will give way to the idea that earth is, and then to the
idea of other earths.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Radical Evolution and Future Shock
in the Paleocybernetic Age

 

It is perhaps not coincidental that Western youth has discovered the
I Ching, or Book of Changes, on a somewhat popular level as we
move into the final third of the twentieth century. Change is now our
only constant, a global institution. The human ecological biosphere is
undergoing its second great transition, destined to be even more
profound than the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic Age. If we
can't see the change, at least we can feel it. Future shock affects our
psyche and our economy just as culture shock disorients the Peace
Corps worker in Borneo.

 

It is said that we are living in a period of revolution. But nothing
sells like freedom: Revolution is big business. As the physicist P. W.
Bridgman once said, the true meaning of a term is found by
observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it. Since
the phenomenon we call revolution is worldwide, and since it's felt in
every human experience, perhaps we might think of it not as
revolution but as radical evolution. Revolution is basically the same
whether defined by Marx or the I Ching: removal of the antiquated.
But revolution replaces one status quo with another. Radical
evolution is never static; it's a perpetual state of polarization. We
could think of it as involuntary revolution, but whatever terminology
we apply that's the condition of the world today, the environment with
which the artist must work. Radical evolution would be kinder if it
were better understood; but it won't be so long as commercial
entertainment cinema continues to represent a "reality" that doesn't
exist.

 

Sociologist Alvin Toffler has stressed ephemerality as a chief
aspect of radical evolution: "Smith Brothers Cough Drops, Calumet
Baking Soda, Ivory Soap, have become institutions by virtue of their
long reign in the marketplace. In the days ahead, few products will
enjoy such longevity. Corporations may create new products
knowing full well they'll remain on the market for only a matter of a
few weeks or months. By extension, the corporations themselves—
as well as unions, government agencies and all other organiza

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Age 51

 

tions— may either have shorter life-spans or be forced to undergo
incessant and radical reorganization. Rapid decay and regeneration
will be the watchwords of tomorrow."8 Toffler observes that no
reasonable man should plan his life beyond ten years; even that, he
says, is risky. When parents speak of their sons becoming lawyers
they are deceiving themselves and their sons, according to the
sociologist, "Because we have no conception of what being a lawyer
will mean twenty years hence. Most probably, lawyers will be
computers." In fact, we can't be sure that some occupations will
even exist when our children come of age. For example, the
computer programmer, a job first created in the 1950's, will be as
obsolete as the blacksmith within a decade; computers will reprogram
and even regenerate themselves (IBM recently announced
a new computer that repairs itself).

 

John McHale, coauthor of the World Design Science Decade
documents with Buckminster Fuller, emphasizes expendability and
impermanence in radical evolution: "Use value is replacing
ownership value. For example, the growth of rental and services—
not only in automobiles and houses, but from skis to bridal gowns to
heirloom silver, castles and works of art... our personal and household
objects, when destroyed physically or outmoded symbolically,
may be replaced by others exactly similar. A paper napkin, a suit, a
chair, an automobile, are items with identical replacement value.
Metals in a cigarette lighter today may be, within a month or year,
part of an auto, lipstick case or orbiting satellite... the concept of
permanence in no way enables one to relate adequately to our
present situation."9

 

McHale has seen the need for a totally new world view as radical
evolution speeds farther from our grasp. "There's a mythology
abroad which equates the discovery and publication of newfacts
with new knowledge. Knowledge is not simply accumulated facts but
the reduction of unrelated and often apparently irrelevant facts into
new conceptual wholes."10 He's talking about completely new ways

 

8 Alvin Toffler, "The Future as a Way of Life,"Horizon (Summer, 1965).
9John McHale, "The Plastic Parthenon,"Dotzero (Spring, 1967).
10John McHale, "Information Explosion— Knowledge Implosion," Good News, eds. Edwin
Schlossberg and Lawrence Susskind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968)

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

52 Expanded Cinema

 

of looking at the world and everything in it. This is proposition far
more profound than mere political revolution, which Krishnamurti has
characterized as "The modification of the right according to the ideas
of the left.''11 The new consciousness transcends both right and left.
We must redefine everything.

 

What happens to our definition of "intelligence" when computers,
as an extension of the human brain, are the same size, weight, and
cost as transistor radios? They're being developed through the
microelectronics process of Large-Scale Integration.

 

What happens to our definition of "morality" when biochemists are
about to unravel the secrets of the DNA/RNA interaction mechanism
to create human life?

 

What happens to our definition of "man" when our next door
neighbor is a cyborg (a human with inorganic parts)? There are
several crude cyborgs in the world today.

 

What happens to our definition of "environment" when our video
extensions bring us the reality of the solar system daily? What do we
mean by "nature" under these circumstances? (McLuhan: "The first
satellite ended nature in the conventional sense.")

 

What happens to our definition of "creativity" when a computer
asks itself an original question without being programmed to do so?
This has occurred several times.

 

What happens to our definition of "family" when the intermedia
network brings the behavior of the world into our home, and when
we can be anywhere in the world in a few hours?

 

What happens to our definition of "progress" when, according to
Louis Pauwels: "For the really attentive observer the problems facing
contemporary intelligence are no longer problems of progress. The
concept of progress has been dead for some years now. Today it is a
question of a change of state, a transmutation.''12 Or Norbert Wiener:
"Simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength but
one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.''13

 

11 J. Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom (Wheaton, III.: Quest Books, 1968), pp.
25, 26.
12Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Avon
Books, 1968), pp. xxii, xxiii.
13 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Avon Books, 1967), p.

 

66.
ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Age 53

 

What happens to our definitions of "material" and "spiritual" when
science has found no boundary between the two? Although it is still
popularly assumed that the world is divided into animate and
inanimate phenomena, virologists working at the supposed threshold
between life and nonlife at the virus level have in fact discovered no
such boundary. "Both animate and inanimate have persisted right
across yesterday's supposed threshold in both directions...
subsequently what was animate has become foggier and foggier...
no life, per se, has been isolated.''14

 

Indeed, what becomes of "reality" itself as science expands its
mastery of the forces of the universe? "The paradox of twentieth-
century science consists of its unreality in terms of sense impressions.
Dealing as it does in energy transformation and submicroscopic
particles, it has become a kind of metaphysics practiced by a
devoted priestly cult— totally as divorced from the common-sense
notions of reality as was the metaphysics practiced by witch doctors
and alchemists. It is not at all odd, then, to discover that the closer
we come via the scientific method to 'truth,' the closer we come to
understanding the 'truth' symbolized in myths.''15

 

This, then, is merely a superficial glimpse at some of the phenomena
that characterize the Paleocybernetic Age. Quite clearly man
is in the paradoxical position of existing in a state of consciousness
without being able to understand it. Man does not comprehend his
relationship to the universe, either physical or metaphysical. He
insists on "doing his thing" without the slightest notion of what his
"thing" might be. This cosmic credibility gap exists primarily between
the facts of scientific experience and the illusions of environmental
conditioning as manifested in the global intermedia network.

 

14 R. Buckminster Fuller, "Planetary Planning," text of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial
Lecture, New Delhi, India, November 13, 1969.
15 John N. Bleibtreu, The Parable of the Beast (New York: Collier Books, 1969), p. 112.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Intermedia Network as Nature

 

The point I wish to make here is obvious yet vital to an
understanding of the function of art in the environment, even though
it is consistently ignored by the majority of film critics. It's the idea
that man is conditioned by his environment and that "enviromnent"
for contemporary man is the intermedia network. We are conditioned
more by cinema and television than by nature. Once we've agreed
upon this, it becomes immediately obvious that the structure and
content of popular cinema is a matter of cardinal importance, at least
as serious as most political issues, and thus calls for comment not
from journalists but from those who work at the matter, artists
themselves.

 

The cinema isn't just something inside the environment; the
intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books,
and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that
carries the messages of the social organism. It establishes meaning
in life, creates mediating channels between man and man, man and
society. "In earlier periods such traditional meaning and value
communication was carried mainly in the fine and folk arts. But today
these are subsumed amongst many communicating modes. The
term 'arts' requires expansion to include those advanced technological
media which are neither fine nor folk.''16

 

We've seen the need for new concepts regarding the nature of
existence; yet concepts are expanded or constricted in direct relation
to the relevancy of prevailing languages. In a world where change is
the only constant, it's obvious we can't afford to rely on traditional
cinematic language. The world has changed immeasurably in the
seventy years since the birth of cinema: for one thing "world" now
includes the microcosm of the atom and the macrocosm of the universe
in one spectrum. Still popular films speak a language
developed by Griffith, Lumière, Méliès, derived from traditions of
vaudeville and literature.

 

In the Agricultural Age man was totally passive, conditioned and
victimized by the environment. In the Industrial Age man's role was

 

16 John McHale, "Education for Real," Good News.

 

54

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Intermedia Network as Nature 55

 

participatory; he became more aggressive and successful in his
attempts to control his environment. We're now moving into the
Cybernetic Age in which man learns that to control his environment
he must cooperate with it; he not only participates but actually
recreates his environment both physical and metaphysical, and in
turn is conditioned by it.

 

To be free of the toil of old relationships we must first be free of the
conditioning that instills it within us. As radical evolution gains
momentum the need to unlearn our past becomes increasingly clear:
contemporary life is a process of miseducation/uneducation/reeducation,
at a cost of much precious time. McLuhan has noted that
the true significance of Pavlov's experiments was that any controlled
man-made environment is a conditioner that creates "non-perceptive
somnambulists." Since then science has discovered that "molecular
memory" is operative in single-celled and some multi-celled
organisms, and there's evidence that memory-in-the-flesh exists in
humans as well. Biochemists have proven that learned responses to
environmental stimuli are passed on phylogenetically from
generation to generation, encoded in the RNA of the organism's
physical molecular structure.17 And what could be a more powerful
conditioning force than the intermedia network, which functions to
establish meaning in life?

 

Science has proven that there's no such thing as "human nature."
Just as water takes the shape of its container, so human nature is
relative to its past and present conditioning. Optimum freedom of
behavior and increased self-awareness are implicit in the industrial
equation that is trending toward physical success for all men;
Paleocybernetic man, however, has not learned to control the environment
he creates. "The content of what is available for emulation
on the part of the young in each society is itself culturally shaped
and limited... the individual typically remains, throughout his lifetime,
unaware of how his own habits, which to him appear 'only natural,' in
fact result from a learning process in which he never had an
opportunity to attempt alternative responses.''18 This process

 

17 Bleibtreu, op. cit., pp. 85-114.
18 Segall, Campbell, Herskovits, op. cit., p. 10.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

56 Expanded Cinema

 

of enculturation produces phenomenal absolutism, the tendency to
interpret our experience as volitional, objective, and absolute; it will
have ever-increasing consequences as radical evolution continues
to accelerate.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Popular Culture and the Noosphere

 

Contemporary man is fortunate to have a tool that makes him aware
of his own enculturation and thus he enjoys greater psychic freedom
than his ancestors. This tool is what Teilhard de Chardin has called
the noosphere, the film of organized intelligence that encircles the
planet, superposed on the living layer of the biosphere and the
lifeless layer of inorganic material, the lithosphere. The minds of
three-and-a-half-billion humans— twenty-five percent of all humans
who ever lived— currently nourish the noosphere; distributed around
the globe by the intermedia network, it becomes a new "technology"
that may prove to be one of the most powerful tools in man's history.

 

John McHale: "World communications... diffuse and interpenetrate
local cultural tradition, providing commonly-shared cultural
experience in a manner unparalleled in human history. Within this
global network the related media share and transmit man's symbolic
needs and their expression on a world scale. Besides the
enlargement of the physical world, these media virtually extend our
psychical environment, providing a constant stream of moving,
fleeting images of the world for our daily appraisal. They provide
psychic mobility for the greater mass of our citizens. Through these
devices we can telescope time, move through history, and span the
world in a great variety of unprecedented ways.''19

 

Like all energy sources the noosphere can be used for negative
purposes. Its resources can be manipulated to disguise craft as
creativity, especially in these Paleocybernetic days when we're still
impressed by the sudden influx of information. Fuller has
differentiated craft from industry by demonstrating that craft is
inherently local in technique and effect whereas industry is inherently
comprehensive and universal in technique and effect. One might
make a similar analogy between entertainment and art: entertainment
is inherently "local," that is, of limited significance, whereas
art is inherently universal and of unlimited significance. Too often
today we find that so-called artists working in the intermedia

 

19 John McHale, "The Plastic Parthenon."

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

58 Expanded Cinema

 

network are little more than adroit imitators, collectors of data and
phenomena, which they glean from the noosphere and amalgamate
into packages that are far from whole. They're clever and glib;
they've made an art of selling themselves, but they know only effect,
not cause; they are merchants of mannerisms.

 

It is precisely this confusion that clouds critical appraisal of
"content" in the popular arts. All too frequently eclectic thinking is
confused with creative thinking. The distinction is subtle to be sure:
integrative thinking can be the highest form of creativity. Indeed both
art and science function to reveal similarities within an a priori
universe of apparent dissimilarities. As with all else, however, there's
an art and a craft to thinking, and the popular entertainments remain
at the craft level by the very nature of their purpose.

 

The intermedia network has made all of us artists by proxy. A
decade of television-watching is equal to a comprehensive course in
dramatic acting, writing, and filming. Compressed in such constant
and massive dosage, we begin to see the methods and clichés more
clearly; the mystique is gone— we could almost do it ourselves.
Unfortunately too many of us do just that: hence the glut of sub-
mediocre talent in the entertainment industry. Paradoxically this
phenomenon carries with it the potential of finally liberating cinema
from its umbilical to theatre and literature, since it forces the movies
to expand into ever more complex areas of language and
experience. Evidence of television's effect on the cinema is already
apparent, as we shall see in our discussion of synaesthetic cinema.
From another more immediate perspective, however, it is quite
unfortunate. We live in an age of hyperawareness, our senses
extended around the globe, but it's a case of aesthetic overload: our
technological zeal has outstripped our psychic capacity to cope with
the influx of information. We are adrift on the surface of radical
evolution unable to plumb the depths of its swift and turbulent
current.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Art, Entertainment, Entropy

 

"It is easier to copy than to think, hence fashion. Besides, a community of
originals is not a community."

 

WALLACE STEVENS

 

The current generation is engaged in an unprecedented questioning
of all that has been held essential. We question traditional concepts
of authority, ownership, justice, love, sex, freedom, politics, even
tradition itself. But it's significant that we don't question our
entertainment. The disenfranchised young man who dropped out of
college, burned his draft card, braids his hair, smokes pot, and digs
Dylan is standing in line with his girl, who takes the pill, waiting to
see The Graduate or Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider— and they're
reacting to the same formulas of conditioned response that lulled
their parents to sleep in the 1930's.

 

We've seen the urgent need for an expanded cinematic language. I
hope to illustrate that profit-motivated commercial entertainment, by
its very nature, cannot supply this new vision. Commercial
entertainment works against art, exploits the alienation and boredom
of the public, by perpetuating a system of conditioned response to
formulas. Commercial entertainment not only isn't creative, it actually
destroys the audience's ability to appreciate and participate in the
creative process. The implications become apparent when we
realize that, as leisure time increases, each human will be forced to
become a creative, self-sufficient, empirical energy laboratory.

 

D. H. Lawrence has written: "The business of art is to reveal the
relation between man and his circumambient universe at this living
moment. As mankind is always struggling in the toil of old
relationships, art is always ahead of its 'times,' which themselves are
always far in the rear of the living present." Jean-Jacques Lebel
stated the same idea in different terms when he described art as "the
creation of a new world, never seen before, imperceptibly gaining on
reality."20
20 Jean-Jacques Lebel, "On the Necessity of Violation," The Drama Review (Fall, 1968).

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

60 Expanded Cinema

 

We've seen that man is conditioned by, and reacts to, certain
stimuli in the man-made environment. The commercial entertainer is
a manipulator of these stimuli. If he employs a certain trigger
mechanism, we're guaranteed to react accordingly, like puppets,
providing he manipulates the trigger properly. I'm not saying the
artist doesn't resort to audience manipulation; we know he often
does. The point, however, is the motivation in doing so. If the artist
must resort to trigger mechanisms to make himself clear, he will; but
it's only a means to his end. In the case of the commercial
entertainer, however, it's the end in itself.

 

Plot, story, and what commonly is known as "drama" are the
devices that enable the commercial entertainer to manipulate his
audience. The very act of this manipulation, gratifying conditioned
needs, is what the films actually are about. The viewer purchases it
with his ticket and is understandably annoyed if the film asks him to
manipulate himself, to engage in the creative process along with the
artist. Our word poetry derives from the Greek root poiein meaning
"to make" or "to work." The viewer of commercial entertainment
cinema does not want to work; he wants to be an object, to be acted
upon, to be manipulated. The true subject of commercial
entertainment is this little game it plays with its audience.

 

By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to
formulas, by forcing us to rely ever more frequently on memory, the
commercial entertainer encourages an unthinking response to daily
life, inhibiting self-awareness. Driven by the profit motive, the
commercial entertainer dares not risk alienating us by attempting
new language even if he were capable of it. He seeks only to gratify
preconditioned needs for formula stimulus. He offers nothing we
haven't already conceived, nothing we don't already expect. Art
explains; entertainment exploits. Art is freedom from the conditions
of memory; entertainment is conditional on a present that is
conditioned by the past. Entertainment gives us what we want; art
gives us what we don't know we want. To confront a work of art is to
confront oneself— but aspects of oneself previously unrecognized.

 

The extent to which blatant audience manipulation not only is
tolerated but extolled is alarming. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, in
his interview with François Truffaut, finds merit in his ability to
manipulate preconditioned needs for formula stimulus. Speaking of
Psycho, Hitchcock frankly admits: "It wasn't a message that stirred

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Art, Entertainment, Entropy 61

 

them, nor was it a great performance, or their enjoyment of the
novel... they were aroused by the construction of the story, and the
way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react
and become emotional.''21

 

It is essential to understand that Hitchcock openly admits that he
didn't even try to expand awareness or to communicate some
significant message, but only exploited a universal tradition of
dramatic manipulation in order to supply his audience with the
gratification it paid for. The audience sees itself and its dreams
reflected in the film and reacts according to memory, which
Krishnamurti has characterized as being always conditioned.
"Memory," says Krishnamurti, "is always in the past and is given life
in the present by a challenge. Memory has no life in itself; it comes
to life in the challenge [preconditioned formula stimulus]. And all
memory, whether dormant or active, is conditioned."22 It is this
process that the entertainment industry calls audience identification.

 

To a healthy mind, anything that is primarily art is also immensely
entertaining. It seems obvious that the most important things should
be the most entertaining. Where there's a difference between what
we "like" and what we know to be vital, we have a condition of
schizophrenia, an unnatural and destructive situation. I speak
deliberately of a "healthy" mind as one capable of creative thinking.
Filmmaker Ken Kelman: "The old cinema removes experience,
making us see things along with (or through) a protagonist with
whom we identify, and a plot in which we are caught. Such an
approach tends toward not only a lack of viewpoint, of definition of
whose experience it is, but also filters the power of sight into mere
habit, dissolves insight into vicariousness. The spectator is reduced
to a voyeur— which is, increasingly, the individual's role in society at
large."23

 

 Minimalist painter David Lee: "When people do not trust their
senses they lack confidence in themselves. For the last few
centuries people have lacked confidence. They have not trusted

 

21 François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 211.
22 Krishnamurti, op. cit., p. 54.
23 Ken Kelman, "Anticipations of the Light,"The New American Cinema, ed. Gregory
Battcock (New York: Dutton Paperbacks, 1967), pp. 24, 25.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

62 Expanded Cinema

 

their experience to provide a standard for knowing how to act."24 It is
quite obvious that most of us not only don't know much about art, we
don't even know what we like. Krishnamurti: "One of the fundamental
causes of the disintegration of society is copying, which is the
worship of authority."25

 

Imitation is the result of inadequate information. Information results
in change. Change requires energy. Energy is the result of adequate
information Energy is directly proportional to the amount of
information about the structure of a system. Norbert Wiener: "Information
is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the
outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjustment felt upon it …
to live effectively is to live with adequate information."26 From the
cinema we receive conceptual information (ideas) and design
information (experiences). In concert they become one phenomenon,
which I've described as the experiential information of aesthetic
conceptual design. This information is either useful (additive) or redundant.
Useful information accelerates change. Redundant information
restricts change. If sustained long enough redundant information
finally becomes misinformation, which results in negative
change.

 

In communication theory and the laws of thermodynamics the
quantity called entropy is the amount of energy reversibly
exchanged from one system in the universe to another. Entropy also
is the measure of disorder within those systems. It measures the
lack of information about the structure of the system. For our
purposes "structure of the system" should be taken to mean "the
human condition," the universal subject of aesthetic activity. Entropy
should be understood as the degree of our ignorance about that
condition. Ignorance always increases when a system's messages
are redundant. Ignorance is not a state of limbo in which no
information exists, but rather a state of increasing chaos due to
misinformation about the structure of the system.

 

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is constant: it
cannot be created or destroyed; its form can change, but not its quantity.

 

24David Lee, "A Systematic Revery from Abstraction to Now,"Minimal Art, ed. Gregory
Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 195.
25Krishnamurti, op. cit., p. 41.
26Wiener, op. cit., pp. 26, 27.

 

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Art, Entertainment, Entropy 63

 

The Second Law states that the amount of energy within a local
system is naturally entropic— it tends toward disorder, dissipation,
incoherence. And since energy is defined as "a capacity to rearrange
elemental order," entropy, which runs counter to that
capacity, means less potential for change. We've learned from
physics that the only anti-entropic force in the universe, or what is
called negentropy (negative entropy), results from the process of
feedback. Feedback exists between systems that are not closed but
rather open and contingent upon other systems. In the strictest
sense there are no truly "closed" systems anywhere in the universe;
all processes impinge upon and are affected by other processes in
some way. However, for most practical purposes, it is enough to say
that a system is "closed" when entropy dominates the feedback
process, that is, when the measure of energy lost is greater than the
measure of energy gained.

 

The phenomenon of man, or of biological life on earth taken as a
process, is negentropic because its subsystems feed energy back
into one another and thus are self-enriching, regenerative. Thus
energy is wealth, and wealth according to Buckminster Fuller is "the
number of forward days a given system is sustainable." Biologist
John Bleibtreu arrived at a similar conclusion when he noted that the
concept of time can best be viewed as a function of the Second Law
of Thermodynamics— that the measure of entropy in a system is a
measure of its age, or the passage of time since the system
originated.27 In other words the degree of a system's entropy is
equal to redundancy or stasis whereas its negentropy is equal to
kinesis or change. So information becomes energy when it
contributes to the self-enriching omni-regenerative wealth of the
system. When it's not contributing (i.e., redundant) it is allowing the
natural entropy to increase.

 

"It is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like
sets of states of the external world... in fact, it is possible to interpret
the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of
its entropy... that is, the more probable the message the less
information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than
great poems."28 Thus the more information concerning the human

 

27 Bleibtreu, op. cit., p. 15.
28 Wiener, op. cit., p. 31.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

64 Expanded Cinema

 

condition that the artist is able to give us, the more energy we have
with which to modify ourselves and grow in accord with the
accelerating accelerations of the living present.

 

Commercial entertainment may be considered a closed system
since entropy dominates the feedback process. To satisfy the profit
motive the commercial entertainer must give the audience what it
expects, which is conditional on what it has been getting, which is
conditional on what it previously received, ad infinitum. Inherent in
the term "genre," which applies to all entertainment, is that it must be
probable. The content of westerns, gangster movies, romances, etc.,
is probable in that it can be identified and comprehended simply by
classification. The phenomenon of drama itself usually is not
considered a genre, but is in fact the most universal and archetypical
of all genres. Drama, by definition, means conflict, which in turn
means suspense. Suspense is requisite on the expectation of known
alternatives. One cannot expect the unknown. Therefore
expectation, suspense, and drama are all redundant probable
qualities and thus are noninformative.

 

Drama requires a plot that forces the viewer to move from point A
to point B to point C along predetermined lines. Plot does not mean
"story" (beginning-middle-end). It simply indicates a relatively closed
structure in which free association and conscious participation are
restricted. Since the viewer remains passive and is acted upon by
the experience rather than participating in it with volition, there's no
feedback, that vital source of negentropy. Norbert Wiener:
"Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it
the results of its past performance... if the information which
proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the
general method and pattern of performance, we have a process
which may well be called learning."29 Fuller: "Every time man makes
a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”30

 

In the cinema, feedback is possible almost exclusively in what I call
the synaesthetic mode, which we'll discuss presently. Because it is
entirely personal it rests on no identifiable plot and is not probable.
The viewer is forced to create along with the film, to interpret for
himself what he is experiencing. If the information (either concept or

 

29 Ibid., p. 84.
30 Fuller, Spaceship Earth, p. 92.

 

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Art, Entertainment, Entropy 65

 

design) reveals some previously unrecognized aspect of the viewer's
relation to the circumambient universe— or provides language with
which to conceptualize old realities more effectively— the viewer
recreates that discovery along with the artist, thus feeding back into
the environment the existence of more creative potential, which may
in turn be used by the artist for messages of still greater eloquence
and perception. If the information is redundant, as it must be in
commercial entertainment, nothing is learned and change becomes
unlikely. The noted authority on communication theory, J. R. Pierce,
has demonstrated that an increase in entropy means a decrease in
the ability to change.31 And we have seen that the ability to change
is the most urgent need facing twentieth-century man.

 

The notion of experimental art, therefore, is meaningless. All art is
experimental or it isn't art. Art is research, whereas entertainment is
a game or conflict. We have learned from cybernetics that in
research one's work is governed by one's strongest points, whereas
in conflicts or games one's work is governed by its weakest
moments. We have defined the difference between art and entertainment
in scientific terms and have found entertainment to be
inherently entropic, opposed to change, and art to be inherently
negentropic, a catalyst to change. The artist is always an anarchist,
a revolutionary, a creator of new worlds imperceptibly gaining on
reality. He can do this because we live in a cosmos in which there's
always something more to be seen. When finally we erase the
difference between art and entertainment— as we must to survive—
we shall find that our community is no longer a community, and we
shall begin to understand radical evolution.

 

31 J R. Pierce, Symbols, Signals and Noise (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Retrospective Man and the Human Condition

 

The image I would offer as representative of the Paleocybernetic
Age is that of the dying man whose life passes before him: a Retrospective
Man who discovers the truth about himself too late to make
use of it. The information explosion is not a window on the future so
much as a mirror of the past catching up with the present. The
intermedia network, or global communications grid, taps knowledge
resources that always have existed in discrete social enclaves
around the planet and saturates them into the collective consciousness.
Suddenly the mass public "discovers" African culture,
East Indian and American Indian cultures, folk music, politics.
Knowledge previously the domain of scholars becomes common
knowledge, and precisely at that point when the old order is about to
fade it sees itself clearly for the first time. William Burroughs has
called it the Age of Total Confront, noting that all the heretofore
invisible aspects of our condition have quite suddenly become
visible.

 

Through Duchamp, Cage, and Warhol, for example, we have
rediscovered art in the ancient Platonic sense in which there's no
difference between the aesthetic and the mundane. Although these
men certainly fulfill an avant-garde function in present society, they
in fact conform to the most universal and enduring definition of art. If
they've been rejected as artists by the majority of our citizens it's
because we've been conditioned by an economic system in which
aesthetic concerns must assume a secondary position if the system
is to survive. Thus art is separated from common experience and an
elite hierarchy is established, which seems only natural to everyone
caught up in the economic struggle. John Dewey: "When art attains
classic status it becomes isolated from the human conditions under
which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it
engenders in actual life experience... when, because of their remoteness,
the objects acknowledged by the cultivated to be works of
fine art seem anemic to the mass of people, aesthetic hunger is
likely to seek the cheap and the vulgar."32

 

Twentieth-century man is retrospective also because the symbolic

 

32 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1958), pp. 3, 6.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Retrospective Man and the Human Condition 67

 

and value content of his messages— most of which take the form of
commercial entertainment— is predominantly redundant. Norbert
Wiener: "Society can only be understood through a study of the
messages and the communication facilities which belong to it."33
Almost without exception, these messages tend to be concerned
with what is known as the "human condition." The history of popular
entertainment, in terms of its conceptual content, can be divided into
three general categories: (1) idealization, which corresponds to
states of happiness in which life is seen as a heavenly experience
and man is characterized by his most noble deeds; (2)frustration, an
expression of the conflict between inner and outer realities, when
what is is not what should be; (3) demoralization, generally
expressed as "the blues." In commercial entertainment cinema these
three formulas are followed religiously, almost without exception, and
usually comprise the nature of the message. They are the human
condition, that which is taken for granted, the given, the facts of life.
Everyone has ideals, everyone is frustrated, everyone gets the
blues. But this information is redundant; we must go on from there.

 

Commercial entertainment is "popular" and not what we call art
because it doesn't go on from there. To insure the widest possible
acceptance of his message, the commercial entertainer must speak
a common language. He copies, repeats, or imitates that which
already exists within the grasp of the so-called average man. And
the majority of us embrace it because it offers security, a crutch, in
the knowledge that the miseries we suffer are shared by others. But
art transcends the human condition. The artist doesn't want to hear
our problems and our dreams— he already knows them. Instead he
wants to know what we're doing about them, and he gives us the
instruments we need for the task. The symbol is the basic instrument
of thought; those who create new symbols— artists, scientists, poets,
philosophers— are those who, by giving us new instruments to think
with, give us new areas to explore in our thinking.

 

A rather indignant woman once asked me how I could have the
nerve to suggest that an "abstract" film like Brakhage's Dog Star
Man could be more important than an immortal classic like Renoir's
The Grand Illusion. The new consciousness takes the view that films

 

33 Wiener, op. cit., p. 25.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

68 Expanded Cinema

 

like Renoir's do not contain one single insight into the nature of the
human condition that has not already been absorbed by the collective
consciousness. Bob Dylan: "How many times must a man look
up before he can see the sky? How many ears must one man have
before he can hear people cry?" And my own question: how many
times must we acknowledge the human condition before it becomes
redundant? How long must we tolerate the same facts of life before
we begin seeking new facts? We intuit that the human condition has
expanded since yesterday, but the popular arts aren't telling us. The
human condition does not stop with what we know about ourselves.
Each genuinely new experience expands the definition of the human
condition that much more. Some are seeking those new facts, those
new experiences, through the synaesthetic research of expanded
cinema.

 

Barbara Rose: "The new art... posits an entirely new world view
which shifts cultural values from a death-oriented, commemorative,
past-enshrining culture to a life-oriented, present-oriented civilization...
In this sense [Claes] Oldenburg's monuments represent, as he
contended, not the appearance of something, but its disappearance...
the tomb, the memorial, the shrine, the monument, all belong
to cultures that commemorate."34

 

John McHale: "The problem now is that those areas of our formal
education which deal with the symbolic and value content of our
culture do so almost entirely in terms of the past35... The new
educational technologies are largely being used as twentieth-century
channels to convey a conceptual context which is still nineteenth
century or earlier. The most recent example was mathematics,
where the Sputnik-inspired 'second look' revealed that mathematics
as generally taught was quite out of date. Science has begun to take
a second look at its contents as currently taught. But the arts and
humanities remain relatively unaware of any need to revise the
conceptual framework of studies little removed from the polite
education of eighteenth-century gentry."36

 

34 Barbara Rose, "Problems of Criticism, VI," Artforum (May, 1969), p. 50.
35 McHale, "Education for Real," Good News.
36 McHale, "Information Explosion," Good News.

 

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Retrospective Man and the Human Condition 69

 

The entropy of commercial entertainment is the chaos that results
from its retrospective nature, forever commemorating past events,
historical figures, social eras, life-styles, or the memory of the viewer,
while the living present speeds farther from our grasp. Alvin Toffler:
"We offer children courses in history; why not also make a course in
'future' a prerequisite for every student? A course in which the
possibilities and probabilities of the future are systematically explored
exactly as we now explore the social system of the Romans
or the rise of the feudal manor?"37 We invent the future in the
present. We are what we think the future will be.

 

37 Toffler, op. cit.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Artist as Design Scientist

 

Our discussion obviously has excluded many important works of art
that function completely within the genres of drama, plot, and story.
Citizen Kane, L'Avventura, Pierrot le Fou, and 8½ are dramatic, plot
films, yet no one denies their greatness. We know also that most of
the truly significant films such as Beauty and the Beast or Pather
Panchali operate entirely within parameters of the human condition
as generally recognized. Moreover, common sense tells us that the
artist must work with what exists, with the given, the human
condition; he could produce no art at all if he relied exclusively on
information that is totally new.

 

Yet the undeniable aesthetic value of these works does not
contradict what I have said about art and entertainment. These films
transcend their genres. They are not important for their plots or
stories but rather for their design. Susan Sontag: "If there is any
'knowledge' to be gained through art, it is the experience of the form
or style of knowing the subject, rather than a knowledge of the
subject itself."38

 

To perceive that the artist functions as design scientist we must
first understand that in their broadest implications art and science
are the same. Eddington's classic definition of science, "The earnest
attempt to set in order the facts of experience," corresponds with
Bronowski's view of science as "The organization of knowledge in
such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in
nature… all science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses."39 It's
the same in art: to set in order the facts of experience is to reveal the
relation between man and his circumambient universe with all its
hidden potential.

 

Herbert Read: "Only in so far as the artist establishes symbols for
the representation of reality can mind, as a structure of thought, take
shape. The artist establishes these symbols by becoming conscious

 

38 Susan Sontag, "On Style,"Against Interpretation (New York: Delta Books), p. 22.
39 J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1965), pp. 3,

 

13.
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The Artist as Design Scientist 71

 

of new aspects of reality and by representing his consciousness in
plastic or poetic form... it follows that any extension of awareness of
reality, any groping beyond the threshold of present knowledge,
must first establish its sensuous imagery."40

 

Our word "design" is composed of "de" and "sign," indicating that it
means "to remove the symbol of." In this context "symbol" signifies
ideas distinct from experiences. As design scientist the artist
discovers and perfects language that corresponds more directly to
experience; he develops hardware that embodies its own software
as a conceptual tool for coping with reality. He separates the image
from its official symbolic meaning and reveals its hidden potential, its
process, its actual reality, the experience of the thing. (A. N.
Whitehead: "Process and existence pre-suppose each other.") He
establishes certain parameters that define a discrete "special case"
phenomenon, principle, or concept known as the subject. The work,
in effect, poses this "problem" of perception and we as viewers must
draw from this special case all the "general case" metaphysical
relationships that are encoded within the language of the piece.

 

This language is the experiential information of aesthetic
conceptual design; it is addressed to what Wittgenstein termed the
"inarticulate conscious," the domain between the subconscious and
the conscious that can't be expressed in words but of which we
constantly are aware. The artist does not point out new facts so
much as he creates a new language of conceptual design information
with which we arrive at a new and more complete
understanding of old facts, thus expanding our control over the
interior and exterior environments.

 

The auteur theory of personal cinema indicates those instances
when the filmmaker's design science transcends the parameters of
his genre; our comprehension of that genre, that human condition is
thus expanded. But cybernetics has demonstrated that the structure
of a system is an index of the performance which may be expected
from it.41 That is, the conceptual design of a movie determines the
variety and amount of information we're likely to obtain from it. And
since we've seen that the amount of information is

 

40Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 53.41Wiener, °op. cit., p. 79.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

72 Expanded Cinema

 

directly proportional to the degree of available choices we can see
that drama, story, and plot, which restrict choice, also restrict information.
So the auteur is limited to developing new designs for old
information, which we all know can be immensely enjoyable and
instructive. There are no "new" ideas in L'Avventura, for example,
but Antonioni voiced the inarticulate conscious of an entire
generation through the conceptual and structural integrity of his
transcendental design science, merging sense and symbol, form and
content.

 

Rudolph Arnheim: "Perceiving achieves at the sensory level what
in the realm of reasoning is known as understanding... eyesight is
insight."42 If we realize that insight means to see intuitively, we
acknowledge that Arnheim's assertion is true only when ordinary
vision— conditioned and enculturated by the most vulgar of environments—
is liberated through aesthetic conceptual design information.
Film is a way of seeing. We see through the filmmaker's eyes.
If he's an artist we become artists along with him. If he's not,
information tends toward misinformation.

 

The artist's intuitive sense of proportion corresponds to the
phenomenon of absolute pitch in musicians and answers a fundamental
need in comprehending what we apprehend. In the final
analysis our aptitudes and our psychological balance are a result of
our relation to images. The image precedes the idea in the development
of consciousness: an infant doesn't think "green" when it
looks at a blade of grass. It follows that the more "beautiful" the
image the more beautiful our consciousness.

 

The design of commercial entertainment is neither a science nor
an art; it answers only to the common taste, the accepted vision, for
fear of disturbing the viewer's reaction to the formula. The viewer's
taste is conditioned by a profit-motivated architecture, which has
forgotten that a house is a machine to live in, a service environment.
He leaves the theatre after three hours of redundancy and returns
home to a symbol, not a natural environment in which beauty and
functionality are one. Little wonder that praise is heaped on films
whose imagery is on the level of calendar art. Global man stands on
the moon casually regarding the entire spaceship earth in a glance,

 

42Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1954), p. 37.

 

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The Artist as Design Scientist 73

 

yet humanity still is impressed that a rich Hollywood studio can lug
its Panavision cameras over the Alps and come back with pretty
pictures. "Surpassing visual majesty!" gasp the critics over A Man
and a Woman or Dr. Zhivago. But with today's technology and
unlimited wealth who couldn't compile a picturesque movie? In fact
it's a disgrace when a film is not of surpassing visual majesty because
there's a lot of that in our world. The new cinema, however,
takes us to another world entirely. John Cage: "Where beauty ends
is where the artist begins."

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

PART TWO:
SYNAESTHETIC CINEMA: THE END OF DRAMA

 

"The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem
of fact not realized before."

 

WALLACE STEVENS

 

Expanded cinema has been expanding for a long time. Since it left
the underground and became a popular avant-garde form in the late
1950's the new cinema primarily has been an exercise in technique,
the gradual development of a truly cinematic language with which to
expand further man's communicative powers and thus his awareness.
If expanded cinema has had anything to say, the message has
been the medium.1 Slavko Vorkapich: "Most of the films made so far
are examples not of creative use of motion-picture devices and
techniques, but of their use as recording instruments only. There are
extremely few motion pictures that may be cited as instances of
creative use of the medium, and from these only fragments and short
passages may be compared to the best achievements in the other
arts."2

 

It has taken more than seventy years for global man to come to
terms with the cinematic medium, to liberate it from theatre and
literature. We had to wait until our consciousness caught up with our
technology. But although the new cinema is the first and only true
cinematic language, it still is used as a recording instrument. The
recorded subject, however, is not the objective external human condition
but the filmmaker's consciousness, his perception and its pro

 

1 For a comprehensive in-depth history of this development, see: Sheldon Renan, An
Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: Dutton Paperbacks, 1967).
And for a survey of initial critical reaction, see The New American Cinema, ed. Gregory
Battcock (New York: Dutton Paperbacks, 1967).
2 Slavko Vorkapich, "Toward True Cinema,'' in Film: A Montage of Theories, ed. Richard
Dyer MacCann (New York: Dutton Paperbacks, 1966), p. 172.

 

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76 Expanded Cinema

 

cess. If we've tolerated a certain absence of discipline, it has been in
favor of a freedom through which new language hopefully would be
developed. With a fusion of aesthetic sensibilities and technological
innovation that language finally has been achieved. The new cinema
has emerged as the only aesthetic language to match the
environment in which we live.

 

Emerging with it is a major paradigm: a conception of the nature of
cinema so encompassing and persuasive that it promises to
dominate all image-making in much the same way as the theory of
general relativity dominates all physics today. I call it synaesthetic
cinema. In relation to traditional cinema it's like the science of bionics
in relation to previous notions of biology and chemistry: that is, it
models itself after the patterns of nature rather than attempting to
"explain" or conform nature in terms of its own structure. The new
artist, like the new scientist, does not "wrest order our of chaos."
Both realize that supreme order lies in nature and traditionally we
have only made chaos out of it. The new artist and the new scientist
recognize that chaos is order on another level, and they set about to
find the rules of structuring by which nature has achieved it. That's
why the scientist has abandoned absolutes and the filmmaker has
abandoned montage.

 

Herbert Read: "Art never has been an attempt to grasp reality as a
whole— that is beyond our human capacity; it was never even an
attempt to represent the totality of appearances; but rather it has
been the piecemeal recognition and patient fixation of what is significant
in human experience."3 We're beginning to understand that
"what is significant in human experience” for contemporary man is
the awareness of consciousness, the recognition of the process of
perception. (I define perception both as "sensation" and "conceptualization,"
the process of forming concepts, usually classified as
"cognition." Because we're enculturated, to perceive is to interpret.)
Through synaesthetic cinema man attempts to express a total phenomenon—
his own consciousness.4

 

3 Read, Icon, p. 18.
4 In defining consciousness I concur with R. G. Collingwood: "The kind of thought which
stands closest to sensation or mere feeling. Every further development of thought is
based upon it and deals not with feeling in its crude form but with feeling as thus
transformed into imagination." Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 223.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama 77

 

Synaesthetic cinema is the only aesthetic language suited to the
post-industrial, post-literate, man-made environment with its multidimensional
simulsensory network of information sources. It's the
only aesthetic tool that even approaches the reality continuum of
conscious existence in the nonuniform, nonlinear, nonconnected
electronic atmosphere of the Paleocybernetic Age. "As visual space
is superseded," McLuhan observes, "we discover that there is no
continuity or connectedness, let alone depth and perspective, in any
of the other senses. The modern artist— in music, in painting, in
poetry— has been patiently expounding this fact for decades."5 The
modern synaesthetic filmmaker has been patiently expounding this
fact for decades as well, and with far more success than painters or
poets.

 

Finally, I propose to show that synaesthetic cinema transcends the
restrictions of drama, story, and plot and therefore cannot be called a
genre. In addition to matching McLuhan's view of contemporary
existence, it also corresponds to Buckminster Fuller's observations
on natural synergetics and consequently is negentropic. Before
discussing specifics, however, we must first understand why synaesthetic
cinema is just now being developed into a universal
language, more than seventy years after the birth of the medium.
Like most everything else, it's because of television.

 

5 Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York:
Bantam Books), p. 13.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Global Closed Circuit: The Earth as Software

 

Television Renders Cinema Obsolete
as Communicator of Objective Reality

 

Just as every fact is also metaphysical, every piece of hardware
implies software: information about its existence. Television is the
software of the earth. Television is invisible. It's not an object. It's not
a piece of furniture. The television set is irrelevant to the phenomenon
of television. The videosphere is the noosphere transformed
into a perceivable state. "Television," says video artist Les
Levine, "is the most obvious realization of software in the general
environment. It shows the human race itself as a working model of
itself. It renders the social and psychological condition of the environment
visible to the environment."

 

A culture is dead when its myths have been exposed. Television is
exposing the myths of the republic. Television reveals the observed,
the observer, the process of observing. There can be no secrets in
the Paleocybernetic Age. On the macrostructural level all television
is a closed circuit that constantly turns us back upon ourselves.
Humanity extends its video Third Eye to the moon and feeds its own
image back into its monitors. "Monitor" is the electronic manifestation
of superego. Television is the earth's superego. We become aware
of our individual behavior by observing the collective behavior as
manifested in the global videosphere. We identify with persons in
news events as once we identified with actors or events in fiction
films. Before television we saw little of the human condition. Now we
see and hear it daily. The world's not a stage, it's a TV documentary.
Television extends global man throughout the ecological biosphere
twenty-four hours a day. By moving into outer space, television
reveals new dimensions of inner space, new aspects of man's
perception and the results of that perception.

 

This implosive, self-revealing, consciousness-expanding process is
irreversible. Global information is the natural enemy of local government,
for it reveals the true context in which that government is

 

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Global Closed Circuit: The Earth as Software 79

 

operating. Global television is directly responsible for the political
turmoil that is increasing around the world today. The political
establishments sense this and are beginning to react. But it's too
late. Television makes it impossible for governments to maintain the
illusion of sovereignty and separatism which is essential for their
existence. Television is one of the most revolutionary tools in the
entire spectrum of technoanarchy.

 

We recognize television's negative effect on the popular arts: that it
induces a kind of sedentary uniformity of expression and generates a
false sense of creativity. In its broader consequences, however,
television releases cinema from the umbilical of theatre and
literature. It renders cinema obsolete as communicator of the objective
human condition. It has affected cinema in much the same way
as the invention of photography affected sculpture and painting.
Cubism and other means of abstracting the realistic image were born
with the photographic plate because painting no longer provided the
most realistic images. The plastic arts abandoned exterior reality for
interior reality. The same has happened to cinema as a result of
television: movies no longer provide the most realistic images so
they've turned inward.

 

We're in direct contact with the human condition; there's no longer
any need to represent it through art. Not only does this release
cinema; it virtually forces cinema to move beyond the objective
human condition into newer extra-objective territory. There are
manifold trends that indicate that virtually all cinema has felt the
profound impact of television and is moving inevitably toward
synaesthesis. The progression naturally includes intermediary steps
first toward greater "realism," then cinéma-vérité, before the final and
total abandon of the notion of reality itself. The fact that we're now
approaching the peak of the realism stage is demonstrated by
Warhol, for example, whose recent work contrasts "reality" with
"realism" as manifested in the spontaneous behavior of actors pretending
to be acting. In addition there's virtually all of Godard's work,
as well as John Cassavetes' Faces, James McBride's David
Holzman's Diary, Peter Watkins' The War Game, Gillo Pontecorvo's
The Battle of Algiers, Paul Morrissey's Flesh, and Stanton Kaye's
Georg and Brandy in the Wilderness.

 

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80 Expanded Cinema

 

Most of this work is characterized by an astute blending of scripted
and directed acting with spontaneous improvisation, in which the
actor randomly fills in the parameters of a characterization predetermined
and predestined by the director. Yet precisely because
they attempt to approximate objective reality without actually being
real, places them firmly in the tradition of conventional Hollywood
pretend movies, with the exception of camera presence or what
might be called process-level perception.

 

It's only natural that contemporary filmmakers should be more
successful at imitating reality since the intermedia network makes us
more familiar with it. But there's a curious and quite significant
aspect to the nature of this new realism: by incorporating a kind of
bastardized cinéma-vérité or newsreel style of photography and
behavior, the filmmaker has not moved closer to actual unstylized
reality itself but rather a reality prestylized to approximate our
primary mode of knowing natural events: television. We accept it as
being more realistic because it more closely resembles the process-
level perception of TV watching, in which unstylized reality is filtered
and shaped through the process of a given medium.

 

The traditional dramatic structure of these films becomes more
easily discernible in contrast with pure cinéma-vérité work such as
Jean Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, Pennebaker's Don't Look
Back, or Chris Marker's brilliant Le Joli Mai. A comparison of Faces
or David Holzman's Diary with Warhol's Nude Restaurant is even
more revealing: the difference between prestylized and predestined
realities on the one hand, and Warhol's totally random and only
partially prestylized reality on the other, is brought into sharp focus.
Warhol has expressed regret that a camera cannot simply be
switched on and left running for twenty-four hours, since the "important"
(naturally-revealing) events seem to occur at that moment
just after it stops turning. Godard disclosed similar sentiments when
he said: "The ideal for me is to obtain right away what will work. If
retakes are necessary it falls short of the mark. The immediate is
chance. At the same time it is definitive. What I want is the definitive
by chance."

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetic Synthesis:
Simultaneous Perception of Harmonic Opposites

 

Time, said St. Augustine, is a threefold present: the present as we
experience it; the past as present memory; the future as present
expectation. Hopi Indians, who thought of themselves as caretakers
of the planet, used only the present tense in their language: past was
indicated as "present manifested," and the future was signified by
"present manifesting.”6 Until approximately 800 B.C., few cultures
thought in terms of past or future: all experience was synthesized in
the present. It seems that practically everyone but contemporary
man has intuitively understood the space-time continuum.

 

Synaesthetic cinema is a space-time continuum. It is neither subjective,
objective, nor nonobjective, but rather all of these combined:
that is to say, extra-objective. Synaesthetic and psychedelic mean
approximately the same thing. Synaesthesis is the harmony of
different or opposing impulses produced by a work of art. It means
the simultaneous perception of harmonic opposites. Its sensorial
effect is known as synaesthesia, and it's as old as the ancient
Greeks who coined the term. Under the influence of mind-
manifesting hallucinogens one experiences synaesthesia in addition
to what Dr. John Lilly calls "white noise," or random signals in the
control mechanism of the human bio-computer.7

 

Any dualism is composed of harmonic opposites: in/out, up/ down,
off/on, yes/no, black/white, good/bad. Past aesthetic traditions,
reflecting the consciousness of their period, have tended to
concentrate on one element at a time. But the Paleocybernetic
experience doesn't support that kind of logic. The emphasis of traditional
logic might be expressed in terms of an either/or choice, which
in physics is known as bistable logic. But the logic of the Cybernetic
Age into which we're moving will be both/and, which in physics is

 

6 Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Publications Office, 1956).
7 John C. Lilly, The Human Bio-Computer (Miami, Fla.: Communications Research
Institute, 1967).

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

82 Expanded Cinema

 

called triadic logic. Physicists have found they can no longer describe
phenomena with the binary yes/no formula but must operate
with yes/no/maybe.

 

The accumulation of facts is no longer of top priority to humanity.
The problem now is to apply existing facts to new conceptual wholes,
new vistas of reality. By "reality" we mean relationships. Piet
Mondrian: "As nature becomes more abstract, a relation is more
clearly felt. The new painting has clearly shown this. And that is why
it has come to the point of expressing nothing but relations."8
Synaesthetic cinema is an art of relations: the relations of the conceptual
information and design information within the film itself
graphically, and the relation between the film and the viewer at that
point where human perception (sensation and conceptualization)
brings them together. As science gropes for new models to accommodate
apparent inconsistencies and contradictions, the need for
seeing incompatibles together is more easily discerned. For example,
the phenomenon of light is conceived in both/and terms: both
continuous wave motions and discontinuous particles. And we have
noted our incapacity for observing both movement and position of
electrons.

 

This is but one of many reasons that synaesthetic cinema is the
only aesthetic language suited to contemporary life. It can function as
a conditioning force to unite us with the living present, not separate
us from it. My use of the term synaesthetic is meant only as a way of
understanding the historical significance of a phenomenon without
historical precedent. Actually the most descriptive term for the new
cinema is "personal" because it's only an extension of the filmmaker's
central nervous system. The reader should not interpret
"synaesthetic" as an attempt to categorize or label a phenomenon
that has no definition. There's no single film that could be called
typical of the new cinema because it is defined anew by each individual
filmmaker.

 

I've selected about seven films that are particularly representative
of the various points I wish to make. I'm using them only to illuminate
the nature of synaesthetic cinema in general, not as specific archetypal
examples. Sufficient literature exists on Brakhage's Dog Star

 

8Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc.,
1945), p. 50.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetic Synthesis: Simultaneous Perception of Harmonic Opposites 83

 

Man to preclude any major expository analysis here, but it is exemplary
of virtually all concepts involved in the synaesthetic mode, in
particular syncretism and metamorphosis. Will Hindle's Chinese
Firedrill is an outstanding example of the evocative language of
synaesthetic cinema as distinct from the expositional mode of
narrative cinema. Pat O'Neill's 7362, John Schofill's XFilm, and
Ronald Nameth's Exploding Plastic Inevitable provide some insight
into kinaesthetics and kinetic empathy. Carolee Schneemann's
Fuses, in contrast with Warhol's Blue Movie and Paul Morrissey's
Flesh, illustrates the new polymorphous eroticism. And, finally,
Michael Snow's Wavelength has been chosen for its qualities of
extra-objective constructivism.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Syncretism and Metamorphosis:
Montage as Collage

 

The harmonic opposites of synaesthetic cinema are apprehended
through syncretistic vision, which Anton Ehrenzweig has characterized
as: "The child's capacity to comprehend a total structure rather
than analyzing single elements... he does not differentiate the identity
of a shape by watching its details one by one, but goes straight for
the whole."9 Syncretism is the combination of many different forms
into one whole form. Persian tapestries and tile domes are
syncretistic. Mandalas are syncretistic. Nature is syncre-tistic. The
majority of filmgoers, conditioned by a lifetime of conven-tional
narrative cinema, make little sense of synaesthetic cinema because
their natural syncretistic faculty has suffered entropy and atrophy.

 

Buckminster Fuller: "All universities have been progressively
organized for ever-finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization
is natural, inevitable and desirable. Yet in observing a little
child we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends,
comprehends and coordinates an ever-expanding inventory
of experience.''10

 

It has been demonstrated that all species of life on earth that have
become extinct were doomed through overspecialization, whether
anatomical, biological, or geological. Therefore conventional narrative
cinema, in which the filmmaker plays policeman guiding our
eyes here and there in the picture plane, might be described as
"specialized vision," which tends to decay our ability to comprehend
the more complex and diffuse visual field of living reality.

 

The general impression that syncretism, and therefore synaesthetic
cinema, is empty of detail or content is an illusion: "… it is highly
sensitive to the smallest of cues and proves more efficient in identify

 

9 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press, 1967), p. 9.
10 Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1969), p. 13.
Press, 1967), p. 9.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage 85

 

ing individual objects. It impresses us as empty, vague and generalized
only because the narrowly-focused surface consciousness
cannot grasp its wider more comprehensive structure. Its precise,
concrete content has become inaccessible and ‘unconscious.’11''

 

Synaesthetic cinema provides access to syncretistic content
through the inarticulate conscious. Similarly, it contradicts the
teachings of Gestalt psychology, according to which we must make
an either/or choice: we can choose either to see the "significant"
figure or the "insignificant" ground. But when the "content" of the
message is the relationship between its parts, and when structure
and content are synonymous, all elements are equally significant.
Ehrenzweig has suggested that syncretism is "Gestalt-free perception,"
and indeed this must be the case if one expects any visual
"meaning" from synaesthetic cinema.

 

Paul Klee, whose syncretistic paintings closely resemble certain
works of synaesthetic cinema, spoke of the endotopic (inside) and
exotopic (outside) areas of a picture plane, stressing their equal
importance in the overall experience.12 Synaesthetic cinema, primarily
through superimposition, fuses the endotopic and exotopic by
reducing depth-of-field to a total field of nonfocused multiplicity.
Moreover, it subsumes the conventional sense of time by interconnecting
and interpenetrating the temporal dimension with images that
exist outside of time. The "action" of Dog Star Man, for example,
could be an entire life-span or merely a split second in the inarticulate
conscious of Stan Brakhage. I stress "action" as commonly
understood in the cinema because synaesthetic syncretism replaces
montage with collage and, as André Bazin has observed, "montage
is the dramatic analysis of action." Bazin was perceptive enough to
realize that "only an increased realism of the image can support the
abstraction of montage.''13

 

Synaesthetic cinema subsumes Eisenstein's theory of montage-ascollision
and Pudovkin's view of montage-as-linkage. It demonstrates
that they were certainly correct but didn't follow their own observations
to their logical conclusions. They were restricted by the con

 

11 Ehrenzweig, op. cit., pp. 19, 20.
12 Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961).
13 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Los Angeles, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1967), p. 39.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

86 Expanded Cinema

 

sciousness of their times. Synaesthetic cinema transcends the notion
of reality. It doesn't "chop the world into little fragments," an effect
Bazin attributed to montage, because it's not concerned with the
objective world in the first place. The new filmmaker is showing us
his feelings. Montage is indeed an abstraction of objective reality;
that's why, until recently, Warhol did not cut his films at all. But
synaesthetic syncretism is the only mode in which the manifestations
of one's consciousness can be approximated without distortion.

 

There's no conflict in harmonic opposites. Nor is there anything that
might be called linkage. There is only a space-time continuum, a
mosaic simultaneity. Although composed of discrete elements it is
conceived and edited as one continuous perceptual experience. A
synaesthetic film is, in effect, one image continually transforming into
other images: metamorphosis. It is the one unifying force in all of
synaesthetic cinema. The notion of universal unity and cosmic
simultaneity is a logical result of the psychological effects of the
global communications network.

 

If montage is the dramatic analysis of action, a film without classic
montage thus avoids at least the structural element of drama
inherent within the medium. All that remains to avoid drama entirely
is to exclude dramatic (i.e., theatrical) content by making content and
structure the same. Warhol's films are not dramatic, and neither are
films at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, synaesthesia. The
classical tension of montage is dissolved through overlapping
superimposition. For example: we have shots A, B. and C. First we
see A, then B is superimposed over it to produce AB. Then A fades
as C fades in. There's a brief transitional period in which we're
seeing ABC simultaneously, and finally we're looking only at BC. But
no sooner has this evolved than B begins to fade as D appears, and
so on.

 

This is a physical, structural equivalent of the Hopi "present
manifested" and "present manifesting" space-time continuum. It's the
only style of cinema that directly corresponds to the theory of general
relativity, a concept that has completely transformed all aspects of
contemporary existence except traditional Hollywood cinema. The
effects of metamorphosis described above become more apparent if
shots A, B. and C happen to be of the same image but from slightly

 

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Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage 87

 

different perspectives, or with varied inflections of tone and color. It
is through this process that a synaesthetic film becomes, in effect,
one image constantly manifesting.

 

And finally we're forced to admit that the pure art of cinema exists
almost exclusively in the use of superimposition. In traditional
cinema, superimposition usually gives the impression of two movies
occurring at once in the same frame with their attendant psychological
and physiological connotations coexisting separately. In synaesthetic
cinema they are one total image in metamorphosis. This does
not imply that we must relinquish what Eisenstein called "intellectual
montage." In fact, the conflict-juxtaposition of intellectual effects is
increased when they occur within the same image. Fiction, legend,
parable, myth, traditionally have been employed to make comprehensible
the paradoxes of that field of nonfocused multiplicity that is
life. Synaesthetic cinema, whose very structure is paradox, makes
paradox a language in itself, discovering the order (legend) hidden
within it.

 

Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man

 

Dog Star Man is a silent, seventy-eight-minute film divided into
Prelude and Parts One through Four. It was shot in 1959-60 and
edited during the next four years. Prelude is an extremely fast
collage of multiple-level superimpositions and compounded images
that emerge from a blurry diaphanous haze and slowly take form,
only to be obscured by other images and countermotions. We begin
to discern specific objects, patterns, and finally a motif or theme: the
elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water; a childbirth; a man climbing
a mountain with his dog; the moon; the sun throwing off huge solar
prominences; lovemaking; photomicrography of blood vessels; a
beating heart; a forest; clouds; the faces of a man and a woman; and
literally thousands of other images to appear in the rest of the film.

 

These images exist essentially autonomously and are superimposed
or compounded not for "dramatic" effect but rather as a kind of
matrix for psychic exercise on the part of the viewers. For example,
over an expanding solar prominence we might see Brakhage's
leonine face or a line of snow-covered fir trees in the mountains of
Colorado. We are not asked to interpret or find "meaning" in these

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

88 Expanded Cinema

 

combinations, though vastly rich experiences are possible. When the
images emerge from a hazy blur, for example, we are not asked to
interpret this as the creation of life or some similar dramatic notion,
but rather as a perceptual experience for its own sake, in addition to
the contextual relationship of this image to the rest of the film, or
what Eisenstein indicated by the term "intellectual montage."

 

Whereas Prelude is a rapid barrage of multiple overlays, Part One
is superimposed sparingly, concentrating on interface relationships
between individual shots. However, every effort is made to subdue
any effect that might be considered montage. The shots fade in and
out very slowly, often fading into a color such as red or green. The
fragments of Prelude fall into place and an overwhelming sense of
oceanic consciousness evolves. We begin to realize that Brakhage
is attempting to express the totality of consciousness, the reality
continuum of the living present. As his solitary figure climbs the
snow-covered mountain, we see images of man's world from the
microspectrum of the bloodstream to the macrospectrum of the sun,
moon, and universe. Both time and space are subsumed in the
wholeness of the experience. Superimposition is not used as an
economical substitute for "parallel montage"— indicating simultaneous
but spatially separate events— for spatio-temporal dimensions
do not exist in the consciousness. Brakhage is merely presenting us
with images orchestrated in such a way that a new reality arises out
of them.

 

When we see the sun superimposed over a lovemaking scene, it's
not an invitation to interpret a meaning such as cosmic regeneration
or the smallness of man in the universe, but rather as an occasion to
experience our own involuntary and inarticulate associations. The
images are not symbolic, as in The Seventh Seal, or artfully composed
as in Last Year at Marienbad. Brakhage does not manipulate
us emotionally, saying: "Now I want you to feel suspense" or "Now I
want you to laugh" or "Now is the time to be fearful." This is the ploy
of the commercial entertainer: an arrogant degradation of cinema,
using film as a tool for cheap sensationalism. This is not to say that
spatio-temporal experiences, or suspense, humor, or any emotion
cannot be found in synaesthetic cinema. Quite the contrary: because
we're dealing with our own personal associations, emotion is

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage 89

 

Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man. 1959

 

64. 16 mm. Color, black and white.
78 min. "The totality of consciousness,
the reality continuum of the living
present."
ARTSCILAB 2001

 

90 Expanded Cinema

 

guaranteed. And it will be more genuinely profound than the formula-
triggered gratification of conditioned response that we receive from
commercial entertainment.

 

Brakhage has spoken of "restructuring" vision through his films,
and often refers to the "untutored" vision of the child before he's
taught to think and see in symbols. In what he calls "closed-eye
vision," Brakhage attempts to simulate, by painting and scratching on
film, the flashes and patterns of color we perceive when our eyes are
closed. Approximately midway through Dog Star Man, otherwise
mundane images take on wholly new meanings and in some cases
new appearances. We stop mentally labeling images and concentrate
instead on the synaesthetic/kinaesthetic flow of color,
shape, and motion.

 

This is not to suggest a nonobjective experience. The images
develop their own syntactical meaning and a "narrative" line is
perceived, though the meaning of any given image may change in
the context of different sequences. This constitutes a creative use of
the language itself, over and above any particular "content" conveyed
by that language. (Wallace Stevens: "A new meaning is
equivalent to a new word.") The effect of synaesthetic cinema is to
break the hold that the medium has over us, to make us perceive it
objectively. Art is utter folly unless it frees us from the need of art as
an experience separate from the ordinary.

 

Wittgenstein has described art as a game whose rules are made
up as the game is in process. The exact meaning of words (images)
becomes known only in the context of each new statement.14 E. H.
Gombrich, on the other hand, demonstrates that objective realism
also is a game, but one whose schema is established prior to its use
and is never altered. Artists and society thus learn to read the
schema as though it were objective reality. But since the language
itself is not used creatively, the viewer is seduced beyond form into
an abstract content with an illusion of being externally objective.15
Thus the viewer is captive under the hold, or spell, of the medium
and is not free to analyze the process of experience.

 

14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1963).
15 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, The Bollingen Series XXXV (New York: Pantheon
Books, Inc., 1960).

 

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Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage 91

 

Brakhage expressed this concept with respect to his own work:
"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye
unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which must know each
object encountered in life through a new adventure of perception.
Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering
with an endless variety of movement and gradations of color.
Imagine a world before the beginning was the word.''16

 

16 Stan Brakhage, "Metaphors on Vision," ed. P. Adams Sitney,Film Culture (Fall, 1963).

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Evocation and Exposition:
Toward Oceanic Consciousness

 

There is an important distinction to be made betweenevocation, the
language of synaesthetic cinema, primarily poetic in structure and
effect, and exposition, the language of narrative cinema, which
chiefly conforms to traditional, literary narrative modes. Intermedia
artist and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann has characterized evocation
as the place between desire and experience, the interpenetrations
and displacements which occur between various sense stimuli.
"Vision is not a fact," Miss Schneemann postulates, "but an
aggregate of sensations. Vision creates its own efforts toward
realization; effort does not create vision.”17

 

Thus, by creating a new kind of vision, synaesthetic cinema creates
a new kind of consciousness: oceanic consciousness. Freud spoke
of oceanic consciousness as that in which we feel our individual
existence lost in mystic union with the universe. Nothing could be
more appropriate to contemporary experience, when for the first time
man has left the boundaries of this globe. The oceanic effect of
synaesthetic cinema is similar to the mystical allure of the natural
elements: we stare in mindless wonder at the ocean or a lake or
river. We are drawn almost hypnotically to fire, gazing as though
spellbound. We see cathedrals in clouds, not thinking anything in
particular but feeling somehow secure and content. It is similar to the
concept of no-mindedness in Zen, which also is the state of mantra
and mandala consciousness, the widest range of consciousness.

 

Miss Schneemann defines perception aseye-journey or empathy-
drawing. It is precisely through a kind of empathy-drawing that the
content of synaesthetic cinema is created jointly by the film and the
viewer. The very nature of evocation requires creative effort on the
part of the viewer, whereas expository modes do all the work and the
viewer becomes passive. In expositional narrative, a story is being
told; in evocative synaesthesia an experience is being created. The

 

17Carolee Schneemann, "Snows,"I-Kon, ed. Susan Sherman, Vol. 1, No. 5 (New York:
March, 1968).

 

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Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness 93

 

figure of Stan Brakhage in Dog Star Man actually moves through a
psychic environment created by the viewer, whose deeply-hidden
creative resources and hungers have been evoked by the film.

 

With typical poetic eloquence, Hermann Hesse has summarized
the evocative effects of oceanic consciousness in this memorable
passage from Demian: "The surrender to nature's irrational, strangely
confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with
the force responsible for these phenomena... the boundaries separating
us from nature begin to quiver and dissolve... we are unable to
decide whether the images on our retina are the result of
impressions coming from without or from within... we discover to
what extent we are creative, to what extent our soul partakes of the
constant creation of the world.''18

 

Will Hindle: Chinese Firedrill

 

There have been essentially three generations of personal filmmakers
in the United States. The first began with the invention of the
medium and continued in various stages through the 1940's. The
second began approximately in the mid-1950's with the increasing
availability of inexpensive 8mm. and 16mm. equipment. It represented
the first popular movement toward personal cinema as a way
of life. The third generation has evolved since the mid-1960's, primarily
in the San Francisco area, where the latest trend is toward a
blending of aesthetics and technology. One reason personal cinema
is more eloquent than commercial cinema is that the filmmaker is
forced into a closer interaction with his technology.

 

Will Hindle is exemplary of this recent technological awareness, a
combination of engineering and aesthetics. Trained in art, literature,
and professional television filmmaking, Hindle has applied his
knowledge to personal cinema in a singularly spectacular fashion.
His ability to invest a technical device with emotional or metaphysical
content is truly impressive. He has, for example, developed
the technique of rear-projection rephotography to a high degree of
eloquence. He shoots original scenes with wide-angle lenses, then
"crops" them by projecting and rephotographing this footage using a
special single-frame projector. Thus extremely subtle effects are

 

18Hermann Hesse, Demian (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 88.

 

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94 Expanded Cinema

 

Will Hindle: Chinese Firedrill. 1968. 16mm.
Color. 24 min. "We discover to what extent
our soul partakes of the constant creation
of the world."

 

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Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness 95

 

achieved that would be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible, if
done through conventional laboratory optical printing.

 

Although many synaesthetic films are wonderfully evocative,
Hindle's recent works are especially notable for their ability to generate
overwhelming emotional impact almost exclusively from cine matic
technique, not thematic content. Hindle has an uncanny talent
for transforming spontaneous unstylized reality into unearthly poetic
visions, as in Billabong (1968), a wordless impressionistic "documentary"
about a boy's camp in northern California, and Watersmith
(1969), a spectacular visual fantasy created from footage of an
Olympic swimming team at practice.

 

Chinese Firedrill, unique in Hindle's work, was prestylized and
"performed" almost in the traditional sense of a scripted, directed,
and acted movie. The difference is that Hindle used the images not
for their symbolic or theatrical content but as ingredients of an almost
iconographic nature, to be compounded and manipulated through the
process of the medium. Although there are "actors" (Hindle plays the
principal role), there is no characterization. Although there are sets,
we're not asked to suspend our disbelief.

 

Chinese Firedrill is a romantic, nostalgic film. Yet its nostalgia is of
the unknown, of vague emotions, haunted dreams, unspoken words,
silences between sounds. It's a nostalgia for the oceanic present
rather than a remembered past. It is total fantasy; yet like the best
fantasies— 8½, Beauty and the Beast, The Children of Paradise— it
seems more real than the coldest documentary. The "action" occurs
entirely within the mind of the protagonist, who never leaves the
small room in which he lives. It's all rooms everywhere, all cubicles
wherever we find man trapped within his dreams. Through the
door/mirror is the beyond, the unreachable, the unattainable, the
beginning and the end. Not once in the film's twenty minutes can we
pinpoint a sequence or action that might be called "dramatic" in the
usual sense. Yet almost immediately an overwhelming atmosphere
of pathos is generated. There are moments of excruciating emotional
impact, not from audience manipulation but from Hindle's ability to
realize metaphysical substance, stirring the inarticulate conscious.
Every effort is made to distance the viewer, to keep us aware of our
perceptions, to emphasize the purely cinematic as opposed to the
theatrical.

 

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96 Expanded Cinema

 

We find Hindle kneeling on the floor of his surrealistic room stuffing
thousands of IBM cards into boxes. Over this we hear a strange
monologue of fragmented words and sentences in an odd foreign
accent. This is punctuated by fierce thunderclaps and howling wind
that evolve into ethereal music and tinkling bell sounds. Periodically
the screen is slashed across with blinding white flashes while the
central images constantly are transformed through lap-dissolves and
multiple superimpositions. There are flash-forwards of images to be
encountered later, though we don't recognize them and therefore
don't interpret them. We see nude lovers, a small boy bathing, a
beautiful woman with candles, a huge eyeball, a battery of glaring
lights. These are noted for their inherent psychological connotations
and not as narrative devices.

 

The most memorable sequence of Firedrill, possibly one of the
great scenes in the history of film, involves Hindle lying in anguish on
his floor and slowly reaching out with one hand toward the
glimmering void beyond his door. Suddenly a mirror-like reflection of
his arm and hand appears on the opposite side of the mirror. When
he removes his hand we see the vague shadowy figure of a nude
woman silhouetted ghostlike, her skin sparkling. In slow motion the
silhouette of a nude man enters from an opposite direction and the
two gossamer figures embrace in a weightless ballet of graceful
motion in some dream of bliss. In the film's final image, the haunted
man has become a child once again, splashing in his bath in a series
of freeze-frames that grow ever fainter until they vanish.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics:
The Way of All Experience

 

The term kinetic generally indicates motion of material bodies and
the forces and energies associated with it. Thus to isolate a certain
type of film as kinetic and therefore different from other films means
we're talking more about forces and energies than about matter. I
define aesthetic quite simply as: the manner of experiencing something.
Kinaesthetic, therefore, is the manner of experiencing a thing
through the forces and energies associated with its motion. This is
called kinaesthesia, the experience of sensory perception. One who
is keenly aware of kinetic qualities is said to possess a kinaesthetic
sense.

 

The fundamental subject of synaesthetic cinema— forces and
energies— cannot be photographed. It's not what we're seeing so
much as the process and effect of seeing: that is, the phenomenon of
experience itself, which exists only in the viewer. Synaesthetic
cinema abandons traditional narrative because events in reality do
not move in linear fashion. It abandons common notions of "style"
because there is no style in nature. It is concerned less with facts
than with metaphysics, and there is no fact that is not also metaphysical.
One cannot photograph metaphysical forces. One cannot
even “represent" them. One can, however, actuallyevoke them in the
inarticulate conscious of the viewer.

 

The dynamic interaction of formal proportions in kinaesthetic
cinema evokes cognition in the inarticulate conscious, which I call
kinetic empathy. In perceiving kinetic activity the mind's eye makes
its empathy-drawing, translating the graphics into emotional-
psychological equivalents meaningful to the viewer, albeit meaning
of an inarticulate nature. "Articulation" of this experience occurs in
the perception of it and is wholly nonverbal. It makes us aware of
fundamental realities beneath the surface of normal perception:
forces and energies.

 

Patrick O'Neill: 7362

 

New tools generate new images. In the historical context of image

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

98 Expanded Cinema

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience 99

 

making, the cinema is a new tool. 7362 is among the few purely
cinematic images to evolve from this new seventy-year-old tool. All
the visual arts are moving toward the cinema. Artists like Frank
Stella or Kenneth Noland have been credited as significant painters
within the last decade because they kept the game going. One is
impressed that they merely discovered new possibilities for a two-
dimensional surface on stretchers. But the possibilities are sonarrow
today that soon there will be nowhere to go but the movies.

 

Pat O'Neill is a sculptor with a formal background in the fine arts.
Like Michael Snow, also a sculptor, O'Neill found unique possibilities
in the cinema for exploration of certain perceptual concepts he had
been applying to sculpture and environmental installations. 7362,
made some five years ago, was the first of many experiments with
the medium as a "sculptural" device. The term is intended only as a
means of emphasizing the film's kinetic qualities.

 

7362 was named after the high-speed emulsion on which it was
filmed, emphasizing the purely cinematic nature of the piece. O'Neill
photographed oil pumps with their rhythmic sexual motions. He
photographed geometrical graphic designs on rotating drums or
vertical panels, simultaneously moving the camera and zooming in
and out. This basic vocabulary was transformed at the editing table
and in the contact printer, using techniques of high-contrast bas-
relief, positive/negative bi-pack printing and image "flopping," a
Rorschach-like effect in which the same image is superimposed over
itself in reverse polarities, producing a mirror-doubled quality.

 

The film begins in high-contrast black-and-white with two globes
bouncing against each other horizontally, set to an electronic score
by Joseph Byrd. This repetitive motion is sustained for several
seconds, then fades. As though in contrast, the following images are
extremely complex in form, scale, texture, and motion. Huge masses
of mechanical hardware move ponderously on multiple planes in
various directions simultaneously. The forms seem at times to be recognizable,
at others to be completely nonobjective. Into this serial,
mathematical framework O'Neill introduces the organic fluid lines of

 

Patrick O'Neill: 7362.1965-66.16mm. Color, black and white.
11 min. "Human and machine interact with serial beauty,
one form passing into another with delicate precision."

 

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100 Expanded Cinema

 

the human body. He photographed a nude girl performing simple
motions and processed this footage until she became as mechanical
as the machinery. At first we aren't certain whether these shapes are
human or not, but the nonrhythmic motions and asymmetrical lines
soon betray the presence of life within a lifeless universe. Human
and machine interact with serial beauty, one form passing into
another with delicate precision in a heavenly spectrum of pastel
colors.

 

John Schofill: XFilm

 

The young Berkeley physicist John Schofill has exhibited a thorough
and creative grasp of kineticism as regards the representational
organic image. Although XFilm is a spectacular example of
montage-as-collage, it does not ignore the conflicts of volume, scale,
mass, and graphic direction that Eisenstein found so central to film
form. Other physiological montage effects postulated by Eisenstein—
metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal— also are used by Schofill
not for any result that might resemble montage, but rather to
generate an overpowering sense of kinaesthesia, or rushing dynamic
force.

 

Through precise manipulation of individual frames and groups of
frames, Schofill creates an overwhelming sense of momentum practically
unequaled in synaesthetic cinema. There is almost a visceral,
tactile impact to these images, which plunge across the field of vision
like a dynamo. Yet they are punctuated with moments of restful
quietude. It is a composition of point-counterpoint, the better to
accentuate kinaesthetic content.

 

Schofill has developed a method of A-B-C-roll editing for superimpositions,
adapted from Karel Reisz's methods of cutting single
footage.19 It's a rhythmic concept, that is, a shot is divided into
definite kinetic "beats." The kinetic activity begins, reaches a middle
point, and ends. In triple superimpositions, the corresponding

 

19Karel Reisz, The Techniques of Film Editing (New York: Hastings House, 1968).

 

John Schofill: XFilm. 1967.16mm. Color. 14 min.

 

"Images which plunge across the field of vision like

 

a dynamo... punctuated with moments of restful

 

quietude."

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience 101

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

102 Expanded Cinema

 

rhythms of each piece of film are matched, fading in and out without
abrupt cuts.

 

XFilm begins with quiet formal imagery: static shots of factories
spewing poison into the sky, strongly reminiscent of Antonioni'sRed
Desert. The structures are seen in eight levels of superimposition of
eight different zoom-lens positions. The sound track explodes with an
extraordinary tape composition by Berkeley composer William
Maraldo, a synthesis of East Indian and rock music that perfectly
counterpoints the visuals with its own sense of dynamic thrust. We
see a series of tableau statements in which a nude girl's cupped
hand opens to reveal a flower, then a factory. Then begins an
accelerating succession of flash-frames, macro-close-ups of electronic
circuitry, tree bark, dirt, plants, human flesh. Each image is
balanced in terms of scales, volumes, masses, directions, and textures
of objects within it. Quite often a particularly smooth or static
image is counterpointed with strobing flash-frames.

 

The most powerful sequence, one which deals purely with the
kinaesthetic experience, involves a time-lapse sunset that begins
with a low horizon, bare-limbed trees, and a blue sky. Suddenly the
action is speeded: clouds and squiggly jet contrails rush up and over.
Maraldo's sound track takes a spiraling, droning dive and the sun
appears, sinking rapidly like a comet from upper left to lower right.
Just as it reaches the horizon the foreground and trees flash brilliant
white (superimposed high-contrast negative over a high-contrast
positive silhouette). The effect is stunning. A train, approaching the
camera, becomes visible as the sun fades, continuing the kin-
aesthetic sense of dynamic volumes and trajectories.

 

Ronald Nameth: Exploding Plastic Inevitable

 

To some extent the so-called psychedelic discotheque was to the
cinema of the sixties what the Busby Berkeley ballroom was to the
thirties. In a larger sense, however, they are by no means in the
same class either socially or aesthetically. The Berkeley extravaganzas,
like Hollywood, were not places but states of mind. They
generated their own ethos, their own aesthetic. They answered an
obvious need for escape from the dreary hardships of the times. Life
imitated art. But thirty years later Hollywood had degenerated to the
point that it was, at best, an imitation of an imitation. The spate of

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience 103

 

"hip" Hollywood films, which began to appear after 1966, was about
as socially significant as the various Kennedy assassination
"souvenirs," and was proffered with the same exploitive street-
vending zeal. Like all commercial entertainment, these films were
about something rather than being something, and so were the
discotheques they imitated.

 

Andy Warhol's hellish sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,
was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque
environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to
say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth's
cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a paragon of excellence in
the kinetic rock-show genre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in
several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois,
managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere
record of an event. Like Warhol's show, Nameth's EPI is an
experience, not an idea.

 

In fact, the ethos of the entire pop life-style seems to be synthesized
in Nameth's dazzling kinaesthetic masterpiece. Here, form and
content are virtually synonymous, and there is no misunderstanding
what we see. It's as though the film itself has exploded and
reassembled in a jumble of shards and prisms. Gerard Malanga and
Ingrid Superstar dance frenetically to the music of the Velvet
Underground (Heroin, European Son, and a quasi-East Indian
composition), while their ghost images writhe in Warhol's Vinyl
projected on a screen behind. There's a spectacular sense of frantic
uncontrollable energy, communicated almost entirely by Nameth's
exquisite manipulation of the medium.

 

EPI was photographed on color and black-and-white stock during
one week of performances by Warhol's troupe. Because the
environment was dark, and because of the flash-cycle of the strobe
lights, Nameth shot at eight frames per second and printed the
footage at the regular twenty-four fps. In addition he developed a
mathematical curve for repeated frames and superimpositions, so
that the result is an eerie world of semi-slow motion against an aural
background of incredible frenzy. Colors were superimposed over
black-and-white negatives, and vice-versa. An extraordinary off-color
grainy effect resulted from pushing the ASA rating of his color stock;
thus the images often seem to lose their cohesiveness as though

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

104 Expanded Cinema

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience 105

 

wrenched apart by the sheer force of the environment.

 

Watching the film is like dancing in a strobe room: time stops,
motion retards, the body seems separate from the mind. The screen
bleeds onto the walls, the seats. Flak bursts of fiery color explode
with slow fury. Staccato strobe guns stitch galaxies of silverfish over
slow-motion, stop-motion close-ups of the dancers' dazed ecstatic
faces. Nameth does with cinema what the Beatles do with music: his
film is dense, compact, yet somehow fluid and light. It is extremely
heavy, extremely fast, yet airy and poetic, a mosaic, a tapestry, a
mandala that sucks you into its whirling maelstrom.

 

The most striking aspect of Nameth's work is his use of the freeze-
frame to generate a sense of timelessness. Stop-motion is literally
the death of the image: we are instantly cut off from the illusion of
cinematic life— the immediacy of motion— and the image suddenly is
relegated to the motionless past, leaving in its place a pervading
aura of melancholy. Chris Marker's La Jetée, Peter Goldman's
Echoes of Silence, and Truffaut's 400 Blows are memorable for the
kind of stop-frame work that Nameth raises to quintessential beauty.
The final shots of Gerard Malanga tossing his head in slow motion
and freezing in several positions create a ghostlike atmosphere, a
timeless and ethereal mood that lingers and haunts long after the
images fade. Using essentially graphic materials, Nameth rises
above a mere graphic exercise: he makes kinetic empathy a new
kind of poetry.

 

Ronald Nameth: Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic
Inevitable. 1966.16mm. Color, black and white. 30
min. "An eerie world of semi-slow motion against an
aural background of incredible frenzy. He makes
kinetic empathy a new kind of poetry."

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Mythopoeia: The End of Fiction

 

"If what we see depicted had been really the truth, successfully created in front
of the camera, the film would cease to exist because it would cease, by the
same token, to be a myth."

 

 ANDRÉ BAZIN

 

In 1934 Erwin Panofsky wrote: "To pre-stylize reality prior to tackling
it amounts to dodging the problem. The problem is to shoot and
manipulate unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style."
The problem that concerned Panofsky was how to work with the two
qualities unique to cinema alone, not to be found in any other
aesthetic medium.

 

The first is its ability to capture and preserve a picture of time. This
is fine until the filmmaker wishes to comment upon or interpret the
events he has captured. Thus we come to the second unique
property of cinema, its aesthetic element: the ability to post-stylize
natural reality. To understand this concept we must examine the
three general purposes to which cinema historically has been applied:
fiction, documentary, and cinéma-vérité.

 

Cinematic fiction should be understood as prestylized or manufactured
reality that did not exist prior to the making of the film. The
only true reality that remains in the finished film is the objective
awareness of the stylization itself. That is to say, a theatrical
scenario-based fiction film deals with a prestylized reality distilled
and recorded through the personality of the writer, then visualized by
the director, crew, and actors according to certain schemata. Not
only is this not objective reality; it's not even the cohesive, unique
reality of one artist's perception.

 

A documentary also deals with prestylized reality. The documentary
filmmaker shifts and reorganizes unstylized material into a
narrative form that explains that reality to the viewer. Thus a
documentary is not an explanation of reality, but rather the reality of
an explanation.

 

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Mythopoeia: The End of Fiction 107

 

Cinéma-vérité, or direct cinema, is based on recording actual
unstylized reality as it exists at a particular moment before the
camera. The filmmaker is never to intrude by directing the action or
in any way alter the events taking place (that is, beyond the
unavoidable alterations caused by his very presence). The film maker's
refusal to intervene directly in the reality before his camera,
and the resultant loosely-organized structure, bring this type of
cinema closer to the truth of the way events move in actual reality.

 

Synaesthetic cinema is all and none of these. It is not fiction
because, with a few exceptions, it is based wholly on unstylized
reality. It is not documentary because the reality is not organized into
an explanation of itself. And it is not cinéma-vérité because the artist
shoots and manipulates his unstylized reality in such a way that the
result has style.

 

This process, best described as "post-stylization," is accomplished
through cinematic equivalents of the four historical styles of art:
realism, surrealism, constructivism, and expressionism.

 

Cinematic realism already has been defined as Cinéma-vérité
capturing and preserving a picture of time as perceived through
unstylized events.

 

Cinematic surrealism is achieved by the juxtaposition of unstylized
elements so incongruous and remote that close proximity creates an
extra dimension, a psychological reality that arises out of the
interface.

 

Cinematic constructivism, as we've discussed it, actually is the
universal subject of synaesthetic cinema: a constructivist statement,
a record of the process of its own making.

 

Cinematic expressionism involves the deliberate alteration or
distortion of unstylized reality, either during photography with lenses,
filters, lights, etc., or after photography with optical printing, painting,
or scratching on film.

 

Post-stylization of unstylized reality results in an experience that is
not "realistic" but neither is it "fiction" as generally understood,
because none of the elements is altered or manufactured prior to
filming. In essence a myth is created, a myth born out of the
juxtapositions of the paradoxes of reality. Webster defines myth as a
story that "serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or
explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon." The natural

 

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108 Expanded Cinema

 

phenomenon explained by synaesthetic cinema is the filmmaker's
consciousness. It is a documentary of the artist's perception. Since
this is not a physical reality, it must be a metaphysical reality, that is,
a myth. In the approximation of this intangible, however, the artist's
language is reality, not fiction. What we see on the screen is not an
act. True, it's processed through the medium until it no longer is
objective reality, but it is nonetheless real. This is mythopoeic reality.
In one sense it renders fiction obsolete.

 

At the beginning of Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard states: "There are
times when reality becomes too complex for communication. But
legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world." This is
the legitimate role of fiction: to establish a framework that provides
insights into otherwise inaccessible areas of the living present. But
most insights inherent in fiction as the simulation of objective reality
have been absorbed by the collective consciousness. The structure
of the system is an index of the performance that may be expected
from that system: the simulation of reality has delivered its maximum
performance; it no longer benefits us as it has in the past.

 

Obviously, filmmakers will continue to prestylize reality; in one
sense the very nature of art is the rearrangement of the environment
for greater advantage to humanity. Yet this prestylization will not be
so clearly separated from "reality" as it has been. Because of
technology, we have now reached the point at which it is possible to
manipulate reality itself in order to create new legends. It may be that
insights most relevant to contemporary society will be achieved
primarily through this language.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetics and Synergy

 

Synaesthetic cinema by definition includes many aesthetic modes,
many "ways of knowing," simultaneously omni-operative. The whole,
however, is always greater than the sum of its parts. This is a result
of the phenomenon called synergy. Synergy is the behavior of a
system unpredicted by the behavior of any of its parts or subassemblies
of its parts. This is possible because there is no a priori
dependency between the conceptual and design information (i.e., the
energy) of the individual parts. The existence of one is not requisite
on the presence of another. They are harmonic opposites. In physics
this is known as the Theory of Complementarity: the logical relation
between two descriptions or sets of concepts which, though mutually
exclusive, are nevertheless both necessary for a complete
knowledge of the phenomenon.

 

Dramatic narrative cinema is antisynergetic. Individual parts of
linear drama predict the behavior of the whole system. For a genre to
exist it must include parts that are integral to the a priori purpose of
the system. As E. H. Gombrich has demonstrated, the function of its
"words" must remain constant and predictable. To gratify conditioned
needs for formula stimulus, the commercial entertainment film must
follow prescribed rules that predict the whole system of conflictcrisis-
resolution.

 

We have seen, however, that the behavior of a conflict or game is
always governed by its weakest moment, which is equivalent to the
notion of a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. This idea,
however, presupposes a linear chain under opposing vectors of
stress, i.e., narrative drama. Fuller: "We tend to think it is logical to
say that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link— which immediately
is thrown out of validity when we join the other end of the chain
back on itself. We think a chain ought to be just an infinite line rather
than a circle because we inherited the Greek concepts of linear and
plane geometry [which] imposed the concept of an infinite surface
and the infinite line as logical to the then-prevalent belief that the
earth was flat... However, in nature all the lines are completely

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

110 Expanded Cinema

 

curved and all chains do eventually return upon themselves."20

 

The malfunction or absence of any one element in a linear
narrative constitutes a break in the system and relinquishes the
system's hold over the viewer's consciousness. But synaesthetic
synergy is possible only when the parts behave with integrity and
without self-consciousness. If the metals in chrome-nickel steel tried
to retain their individuality, the synergetic effect of tripling the tensile
strength through alloy would never occur. Fuller has noted that the
individual tensile strengths of chromium, nickel, and iron are in the
approximate range of 70,000, 80,000, and 60,000 pounds per square
inch respectively. Yet in alloy they yield 300,000 psi tensile strength,
which is five times as strong as its weakest link and four times as
strong as its strongest link.

 

The entertainer makes a package that is equal to the sum of its
separate parts; the artist fuses his parts into an alloy greater than its
ingredients. That is, synaesthetic synergy does not tend toward
greater complexity, but rather produces an effect that in physics is
known as elegant simplicity. An elegantly simple construction
accomplishes that which previously required many different mechanisms,
either physical or metaphysical. Recent revolutionary concepts
in biology are an example. John McHale: "The DNA/RNA
mechanism construct renders obsolete an enormous number of
separate 'biological facts' and relates biology via biochemistry to
biophysics— and thence to a more elegantly simple configuration of
structural hierarchies as extending outward from the micro-nucleus
through the median range of ordinary perception towards macro-
structural hierarchies at the level of galaxies.''21

 

Let us briefly review what we mean by synergy as applied to the
cinema. We have learned that synaesthetic cinema is an alloy
achieved through multiple superimpositions that produce syncretism.
Syncretism is a total field of harmonic opposites in continual
metamorphosis; this metamorphosis produces a sense of kinaesthesia
that evokes in the inarticulate conscious of the viewer recognition
of an overall pattern-event that is in the film itself as well as the

 

20R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (New York: Collier Books, 1969), p. 65.21McHale, "Knowledge Implosion," Good News.

 

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Synaesthetics and Synergy 111

 

"subject" of the experience. Recognition of this pattern-event results
in a state of oceanic consciousness. A mythopoeic reality is
generated through post-stylization of unstylized reality. Post-stylization
simultaneously involves the four traditional aesthetic modes:
realism, surrealism, constructivism, and expressionism.

 

Herbert Read has suggested that these four styles are intercorrelated
to the four modes of human consciousness: thought, intuition,
emotion, and sensation. Of course, they are operative in commercial
entertainment as well; but it's the nature of synaesthetic cinema that
one is made aware of the process of one's own perception; thus one
invests the experience with meaning by exerting conscious control
over the conversion of sight impressions into thought images. We
can easily see how thought, intuition, and sensation may be directly
engaged or indirectly evoked in the synaesthetic viewing experience;
the role of emotion deserves further comment.

 

The emotional content of dramatic narrative cinema is predominantly
the result of expectations that the viewer brings with him to the
theatre, and thus he remains passive during the viewing experience
so that his conditioned response to the formula may be fully gratified.
In this way he satisfies his unconscious need to experience the
particular emotions that he has already decided to experience. The
film is "good" or "bad" in relation to its effectiveness as a catalyst for
these predetermined emotions. However, the emotional content of
synaesthetic cinema exists in direct relation to the degree of
conscious awareness of the act of perceiving, and is thus seldom
predictable. Synergy is the essence of the living present, and it is the
essence of art. Where synergy does not exist, energy tends toward
entropy and change becomes increasingly unlikely.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism

 

"The Western consciousness has always asked for freedom: the human mind was born
free, or at any rate born to be free, but everywhere it is in chains; and now at the end of
its tether."

 

NORMAN O. BROWN

 

For the majority of the mass public, "underground" movies are
synonymous with sex. Although this conclusion was reached for all
the wrong reasons, it is nevertheless accurate. If personal cinema is
indeed personal, and if we place any credence at all in Freud,
personal cinema is by definition sexual cinema. A genuine social
underground no longer is possible. The intermedia network quickly
unearths and popularizes any new subculture in its relentless drive to
satisfy the collective information hunger. Jean-Luc Godard once remarked
that the only true twentieth-century underground was in
Hanoi. But I would suggest that in the history of civilization there
never has been a phenomenon more underground than human
sexuality.

 

The vast political and social revolution that is now irreversible in its
accelerating accelerations around the planet is merely a side effect
of the more profound revolution in human self-awareness that is
producing a new sexual consciousness.

 

We hold the radical primacy of the passions to be self-evident.
Norman O. Brown: "All Freud's work demonstrates that the allegiance
of the human psyche to the pleasure-principle is indestructible
and that the path of instinctual renunciation is the path of sickness
and self-destruction."22 If there is a general debasement of the sexual
act among the bourgeoisie, it is precisely because that sexuality has
been repressed. Charles Fourier: "Every passion that is

 

22 Norman 0. Brown, "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,"
Harper's (May, 1961).

 

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Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism 113

 

suffocated produces its counter-passion, which is as malignant as
the natural passion would have been benign."23

 

Nowhere is this more evident than in commercial cinema. Hollywood
movies are teasers whose eroticism is a result of
psychological conditioning that is not, fundamentally, the enjoyment
of sex itself. Girlie and Hollywood films "for mature adults" are
founded on puritanical concepts of "sin" and other repressive
measures, no matter how "honest" or "artistic" or "redeeming" the
presentation may seem. The absurd notion that sex must somehow
be "redeemed" is exploited by Hollywood as much as by the makers
of girlie or stag films. Hollywood presents "redeemed" sex,
suggesting there's an unredeemed way of doing it and therefore
we're getting away with something. Girlie and stag films take the
opposite approach: they represent sex in various stages of
"unredemption" until the point of watching them becomes more an
act of rebellion, of something "dirty," clandestine, without redeeming
qualities, than the enjoyment of sex. That is to say, the present
socioeconomic system actually contributes to the corruption of the
institution it claims to uphold.

 

However, it is now only a matter of a few years until the final
restrictions on sexuality will disintegrate. The revolution that seeks
the restructuring of social arrangements— a utopia of material plenty
and economic freedom— is secondary by far to that other revolution
that demands the total release of psychic impulses. This imminent
utopia of the senses has been described by the neo-Freudian
psychoanalyst A. H. Maslow as Eupsychia, a view oriented to the
liberation and satisfaction of inner drives as prerequisite to any
effective reorganization of the exterior social order.24 It implies the
necessary transformation of a bourgeois society that perpetrates the
three cardinal crimes against human sexuality: delayed sexual
gratification, restricted to "adults only"; heterosexual monogamy;
specialization of sexual activity limiting pleasure to the genitals.

 

Eupsychia and utopia are both quite inevitable and both quite out of
our hands, for they are the irreversible result of technology, the

 

23Charles Fourier, La Phalange, quoted by Daniel Bell in "Charles Fourier: Prophet of
Eupsychia," The American Scholar (Winter, 1968-69), p. 50.

 

24A. H. Maslow, "Eupsychia— The Good Society," Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
No. 1 (1961), pp. 1-11.

 

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114 Expanded Cinema

 

only thing that keeps man human. The most comprehensive, reliable,
and respected future-forecasts attempted by scientific man indicate
that individual sensorial freedom is virtually synonymous with technological
progress.25

 

Buckminster Fuller is among many who have noted the effects of
industrialization and cybernetics on sexual activity: "We may glimpse
in such patterning certain total behaviors in Universe that we know
little about. We noted, for instance, that as survival rate and life-
sustaining capability increase, fewer birth starts are required. This
may be related to our developing capacities in interchanging our
physical parts, or producing mechanical organs, of having pro.
gressively fewer human organisms to replenish. The drive in
humanity to reproduce as prodigally as possible decreases considerably.
This may be reflected in social behaviors— when all the
girls begin to look like boys and boys and girls wear the same
clothes. This may be part of a discouraging process in the idea of
producing more babies. We shall have to look askance on sex
merely as a reproductive capability, i.e., that it is normal to make
babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the
proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality,
for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted.

 

Repression and censorship become impossible on an individual
level when technology outstrips enforcement. The new image-
exchange and duplication technologies are a formidable obstacle to
effective sexual censorship. Home videotape recorders, Polaroid
cameras, and 8mm. film cartridges render censorship nearly powerless.
One prominent scientist working in laser holography has
suggested the possibility of "pornograms"— pornographic, three-
dimensional holograms mass-produced from a master and mass
distributed through the mail since their visual information is invisible
until activated by plain white light.

 

25See Olaf Helmer, Delphi Study, Rand Corp., 1966; Theodore J. Gordon, "The Effects
of Technology on Man's Environment," Architectural Design (February, 1967); Herman
Kahn, Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000 (New York: Macmillan, 1967); "Toward the
Year 2000: Work in Progress," American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on
the Year 2000, Daedalus (Summer, 1967).
26R. Buckminster Fuller, "The Year 2000," Architectural Design (February, 1967), p. 63.

 

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Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism 115

 

When sexual material is readily available in the home, it changes
the public attitude toward sex in commercial cinema. We aren't likely
to be dazzled by discreet nudity on the Silver Screen when our home
videotape library contains graphic interpretations of last week's
neighborhood bisexual orgy. This is precisely what is happening in
thousands of suburban homes, which otherwise are far from avantgarde.
Within the last three years intermarital group sex has become
an industry of corporate business, particularly in the Southern
California area where a new world man is evolving. Computer firms
compete with one another, matching couples with couples and
compiling guest lists for orgies at homes and private country clubs.
Home videotape systems are rented by the month and tapes of
flagrant sexual activity are exchanged among the participants, many
of whom regularly attend two orgies a week, sometimes as
frequently as four or five, as the will to sexual power overtakes their
outlaw consciousness. They discover the truth in Dylan's remark that
you must live outside the law to be honest.

 

Thus man moves inevitably toward the discovery of what Norman

 

O. Brown describes as his polymorphous-perverse self. A society
that restricts physical contact in public to handshakes and discreet
heterosexual kisses distorts man's image of his own sexual nature.
However, anyone who has ever participated in even the most chaste
encounter groups or sensory awareness seminars such as those
conducted at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, is impressed with the
new sensual identity he discovers within himself, often accompanied
by surprise and embarrassment.
The effects of habitual group sex, even when exclusively heterosexual,
become obvious: man inevitably realizes that there is no
such thing as "perversion" apart from the idea itself. We begin to
recognize that our sexual potential is practically limitless once
psychological barriers are erased. We see that "heterosexual,"
"homosexual," and "bisexual" are social observations, not inherent
aspects of the organism. Freud, and more recently Brown, Marcuse,
and R. D. Laing have noted that the qualities of "maleness" and
"femaleness" are restricted to genital differences and do not even
approach an adequate description of the human libido. And so,
"Genital man is to become polymorphously perverse man, the man
of love's body, able to experience the world with a fully erotic body in

 

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116 Expanded Cinema

 

an activity that is the equivalent of the play of childhood."27

 

Personal synaesthetic cinema has been directly responsible for the
recent transformation in sexual content of commercial movies. After
all, I Am Curious begins to seem a bit impotent when Carolee
Schneemann's Fuses is playing at the Cinémathèque around the
corner. Synaesthetic cinema, more than any other social phenomenon,
has demonstrated the trend toward polymorphous eroticism.
Because it is personal it's a manifestation of consciousness; because
it's a manifestation of consciousness it is sexual; the more probing
and relentlessly personal it becomes, the more polymorphously
perverse it is. (Dylan: "If my thought/dreams could be seen, they'd
put my head in a guillotine.”) Because eroticism is the mind's
manifestation of body ego, it is the one offensive quality that we
cannot be rid of by slicing off a particular appendage. We are forced
to accept it: synaesthetic cinema is the first collective expression of
that acceptance.

 

The art and technology of expanded cinema will provide a
framework within which contemporary man, who does not trust his
own senses, may learn to study his values empirically and thus
arrive at a better understanding of himself. The only understanding
mind is the creative mind. Those of the old consciousness warn that
although the videotape cartridge can be used to unite and elevate
humanity, it also can "degrade" us by allowing unchecked manufacture
and exchange of pornography. But the new consciousness
regards this attitude itself as a degraded product of a culture without
integrity, a culture perverse enough to imagine that love's body could
somehow be degrading.

 

John Dewey reminds us that when art is removed from daily
experience the collective aesthetic hunger turns toward the cheap
and the vulgar. It's the same with the aesthetics of sex: when the art
(i.e., beauty) of sex is denied and repressed we find a "counterpassion"
for the obscene “...as malignant as the natural passion
would have been benign." There is no basis for the assumption that
synaesthetic cinema will contribute to the debasement of sex. We
know that precisely the opposite is true: for the first time in Western
culture the aesthetics of integrity are about to liberate man from

 

27 Richard W. Noland, "The Apocalypse of Norman O. Brown,"The American Scholar
(Winter, 1968-69), p. 60.

 

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Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism 117

 

centuries of sexual ignorance so that he may at last understand the
infinite sensorium that is himself.

 

The Pansexual Universe of Andy Warhol

 

It might be said of Warhol that what he did for Campbell's Soup, he
did for sex. That is, he removed sex from its usual context and
revealed it both as experience and cultural product. From the verbal
jousting of My Hustler and Bike Boy to the casual intercourse of Blue
Movie, Warhol has expressed an image of man's sexuality unique in
all of cinema. Although partial to homosexuality, his work
nevertheless manages to generate an overwhelming sense of the
polymorphous-perverse. This is particularly evident in his most
recent work.

 

For example, a romantic heterosexual relationship of warm authenticity
develops between Viva and Louis Waldron in the notorious
Blue Movie. In Lonesome Cowboy and Paul Morrissey's Flesh,
however, Waldron is equally convincing as a brusque homosexual.
Ironically, it is Morriss ey's beautiful film that epitomizes the unisex
world of The Factory. The Brandoesque Joe Dallasandro is virtually
the embodiment of polymorphous-perverse man as Morrissey interprets
him: the archetypal erotic body, responding to the pleasures of
the flesh without ideals or violence in a pansexual universe.

 

Because of their objective revelatory purpose, Warhol's and
Morrissey's films are not synaesthetic. Yet, because of their non-
dramatic structure, neither are they spectacles. It is spectacle (". . .
something exhibited to view as unusual or entertaining; an eye-
catching or dramatic public display.") that defeats whatever erotic
purpose may exist in conventional narrative cinema. Eroticism is the
most subjective of experiences; it cannot be portrayed or photographed;
it's an intangible that arises out of the aesthetic, the manner
of experiencing it. The difference between sex in synaesthetic
cinema and sex in narrative cinema is that it's no longer a spectacle.
By definition synaesthetic cinema is an art of evocative emotion
rather than concrete facts. The true subject of a synaesthetic film that
includes fucking is not the act itself but the metaphysical "place
between desire and experience" that is eroticism. It ceases to be
spectacle because its real subject cannot be displayed.

 

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118 Expanded Cinema

 

Paul Morrissey: Flesh. 1968. "Joe Dallesandro, the
archetypal erotic body, responding to the
pleasures of the flesh without ideals or violence in
a pansexual universe."

 

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Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism 119

 

Virtually the entire range of erotic experience has been engaged by
the new cinema. Carl Linder is concerned with the surreal/psychological
aspects of sexuality in films like Womancock or The Devil
Is Dead. Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, Ron
Rice's Chumlum, Bill Vehr's Brothel and Waiting for Sugar, and The
Liberation of Mannique Mechanique by Steven Arnold and Michael
Wiese all explore the polymorphous subterranean world of unisexual
transvestism. Stephen Dwoskin's exquisite studies, such as Alone or
Take Me, reveal a Minimalist's sensibilities for latent sexuality and
nuances in subtle autoeroticism. Warhol's Couch, Barbara Rubin's
Christmas on Earth, and Andrew Noren's A Change of Heart
confront, in various ways, the immortal subject of "hard core"
pornography.

 

Carolee Schneemann: Fuses

 

"Sex," as Carolee might say, "is not a fact but an aggregate of
sensations." Thus by interweaving and compounding images of
sexual love with images of mundane joy (the sea, a cat, window-
filtered light), she expresses sex without the self-consciousness of a
spectacle, without an idea of expressivity, in her words, "free in a
process which liberates our intentions from our conceptions."

 

Carolee and her lover James Tenney emerge from nebulous
clusters of color and light and are seen in every manner of sexual
embrace. Often the images are barely recognizable, shot in near-
darkness or painted, scratched, and otherwise transformed until
montage becomes one overall mosaic simultaneity of flesh and
textures and passionate embraces. "There were whole sections,"
Carolee explains, "where the film is chopped up and laid onto either
black or transparent leader and taped down. I also put some of the
film in the oven to bake it; I soaked it in all sorts of acids and dyes to
see what would happen. I cut out details of imagery and repeated
them. I worked on the film for three years." This fragmentation not
only prevents narrative continuity, therefore focusing on individual
image-events, but also closely approximates the actual experience of
sex in which the body of one's partner becomes fragmented into
tactile zones and exaggerated mental images.

 

Every element of the traditional "stag" film is here— fellatio,
cunnilingus, close-ups of genitals and penetrations, sexual acro

 

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120 Expanded Cinema

 

Carolee Schneemann: Fuses. 1965-68.
16mm. Color, black and white. 18 min.
"A fluid oceanic quality that merges
the physical act with its metaphysical
connotation, very Joycean and very
erotic."

 

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Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism 121

 

batics— yet there's none of the prurience and dispassion usually
associated with them. There is only a fluid oceanic quality that
merges the physical act with the metaphysical connotation, very
Joycean and very erotic. There's a fevered kinetic tempo that
flawlessly evokes the urgency of sexual hunger. A "story" is being
told but it's the story of every person in the audience who has wanted
to express the richness of his experience in some concrete way.
Carolee offers a psychic matrix in which this articulation might take
place, and by this very act the spectacle is defeated.

 

Between scenes of lovemaking we see Carolee seated nude
before her window, looking out at the sea as the curtains whisper
lazily in the afternoon breeze. This image is repeated several times
and serves to establish a sense of place and unity; this is a home,
not a whorehouse. If there's anything unique about a pornographic
film made by a woman it's this emotional unity that ties the images
together. Scenes of Carolee skipping merrily through the surf are
given as much prominence as close-ups of fellatio and cunnilingus.
She's filming her consciousness, not her orifices. Fuses moves
beyond the bed to embrace the universe in oceanic orgasm. "The
thing that is disreputable in the idea of pornography for me," she
says, "is that it tends to have to do with the absence of feeling, the
absence of really committed emotions. I was after some kind of
integral wholeness; the imagery is really compounded in emotion."

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetic Cinema and
Extra-Objective Reality

 

Michael Snow: Wavelength

 

Michael Snow's Wavelength, a forty-five-minute zoom from one
end of a room to the other, directly confronts the essence of cinema:
the relationships between illusion and fact, spaceand time, subject
and object. It's the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie, one of the
few films to engage those higher conceptual orders that occupy
modern painting and sculpture. Wavelength has become the forerunner
of what might be called a Constructivist or Structuralist school
of cinema, including the works of George Landow, Tony Conrad,
Snow's wife Joyce Wieland, Paul Sharits, Ernie Gehr, Peter Kubelka,
Ken Jacobs, Robert Morris, Pat O'Neill, and at least two of Bruce
Baillie's films, All My Life and Still Life.

 

A large studio loft in New York: pristine light flooding through tall
curtainless windows, street sounds floating on still air. The
motionless camera is positioned high up, closer to the ceiling than
the floor, so that a certain atmosphere, a certain environmental
ambience is conveyed in that special way the cinema has of creating
a sense of place. In fact, the first thought that comes to mind is that if
a room could talk about itself this is what it would say.

 

Soon we discover the camera isn't static: every minute or so it jerks
slightly forward; we realize the zoom lens is being manipulated
rather clumsily; ever so slowly we are edging toward the wall of
windows. This realization adds the first of many new dimensions to
come: by introducing the element of motion, specifically invisible
motion like the hands of a clock, the filmmaker adds the temporal
element to a composition that in all other respects appears static.
Motion is the only phenomenon that allows perception of time; the
motion here, like time, is wholly conceptual.

 

Minutes pass: we notice subtle details— patterns of light and
shadow, furniture arrangements, signs, tops of trucks, second-story
windows, and other activity seen through the windows. Two women
enter with a large bookcase, which they move against a wall, and
then leave without speaking. There's a dispassionate distance to this
activity, not in the least suggesting anything significant.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

SynaestheticCinema and Extra-Objective Reality 123

 

Michael Snow: Wavelength. 1967.
16mm. Color. 45 min. "The first post-
Warhol, post-Minimal movie, one of
the few films to engage those higher
conceptual orders that occupy
modern painting and sculpture."

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

124 Expanded Cinema

 

Now we notice subtle permutations in the light (is it our eyes or the
focus?). The walls seem darker, the light colder. We see a chair
previously not visible (or was it?). Two women enter again (the same
two?). They walk to a table and sit; apparently they are on a coffee
break. (Perhaps this is a remote section of a warehouse or garment
factory.) The women sit in silence. Suddenly, as though from a
distant radio, we hear the Beatles: “...Strawberry Fields... nothing is
real... living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you
see..."

 

Apart from being eerily prophetic, the music strikes the perfect
emotional chord: the scene assumes a totally different inflection, a
kind of otherworldly dream state. What previously was a cold
impersonal warehouse now appears romantically warm. The music
fades; one woman walks out; the other remains for a few minutes,
then leaves.

 

Up to this point the film has presented a "believable" natural reality,
the sort of filmic situation in which one speaks of "suspension of
disbelief." But now, for the first time, a nonrepresentational cinematic
reality is introduced: there begins a constant alteration of image
quality through variation of film stock, light exposure, and printing
techniques. By changes in light we realize also that we are
alternating between times of day— morning, noon, dusk, night. With
each cut the room appears completely different though nothing has
been physically altered and the position of the camera has not been
changed.

 

At the point when the image goes into complete negative, the
synchronous "natural" street sounds are replaced by an electronic
pitch, or sine wave, which begins at a low 50 cycles and increases
steadily to a shrill 12,000 cycles during the following half hour. Thus
"realistic" natural imagery has become pure filmic reality, and
whatever identifications or associations the viewer has made must
be altered.

 

Night: fluorescent lamps glowing (when did they go on?). In the
blackness through the windows we see fiery red streaks of automobile
taillights. Suddenly there's offscreen scuffling, tumbling,
crashing glass, muffled cries. A man stumbles into the frame, moans,
crumples to the floor with a loud thud below camera range. The
electronic pitch is louder, the zoom closer. Window panes and photo

 

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SynaestheticCinema and Extra-Objective Reality 125

 

graphs on the wall develop phantom images, vague superimpositions
slightly offset. We no longer see the floor or side walls,
just table, windows, photos, still indistinguishable. A girl in a fur coat
enters. The light has changed: the room now appears to be an
apartment. There's a yellow vinyl-aluminum kitchen chair that seems
oddly out of place. The table actually is a writing desk with a
telephone. She dials: “...Hello, there's a man on the floor... he's not
drunk... I think he's dead... I'm scared... should I call the police? ... all
right, I'll meet you outside... " She hangs up, walks out.

 

An overwhelming metaphysical tension engulfs the composition,
filling the emptiness with a sense of density. Suddenly, a superimposed
phantom image of the girl appears, transparently repeating
the motions of entering, dialing, talking, leaving— but in silence
beneath the whine of the sine wave, like some electromagnetic
reverberation of past activity. The ghost image, which refers back in
time to the "real" girl whose presence is linked in time to the death of
the man, develops the only sequential, linear element in an
otherwise nonlinear composition.

 

We realize also that the enlarged superimposed "outlines" around
the window frames and photos refer to future points inthe physical
film itself when these objects actually will be that size. Similarly, the
ghost "flashback" of the girl is a reference to the film's own physical
"past," when the frame contained forms that it no longer contains.

 

Bright daylight: the room no longer is foreboding; the electronic
tone is at its peak. The very light seems alive with a cold scintillation.
The camera edges closer, blocking out the windows, until finally we
distinguish the photograph on the wall: a picture of the ocean. A
superimposed halo appears around the photo; suddenly the screen is
an abstract (or more precisely, literalist) geometrical composition,
totally symmetrical. This no longer is a room, no longer a movie, but
quite literally an object— still photographs running through a
projector.

 

Now the zoom advances to within the ocean photo; the sea
consumes the entire screen. The electronic pitch runs a berserk
glissando up and down the tone scale; We gaze at the ocean
hypnotically: the fathomless water betraying no depth; the rhythmical
waves frozen in time, answering some cosmic lunar force (Snow: "An

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

126 Expanded Cinema

 

implication of universal continuity”). We remember Chabrol's remark:
"There are no waves; there is only the ocean." For a long time we
stare mindlessly at this ocean and then, very slowly, it fades into
nothingness.

 

Like so many experimental filmmakers Michael Snow came to the
cinema by way of painting and sculpture. His Expo '67 exhibit and
recent New York showings have attracted considerable attention due
to their exploration of the act of seeing as applied to Minimal
sculpture. An understanding of Minimal Art is essential to the
appreciation of Wavelength (shot in one week of December, 1966).
Remembering Warhol's pivotal contribution, it is still possible to say
that Wavelength is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation
with the nature of the medium: It is a triumphant and definitive
answer to Bazin's question,"Que-est-ce que le cinéma?"

 

Like all truly modern art, Wavelength is pure drama of confrontation.
It has no "meaning" in the conventional sense. Its meaning is
the relationship between film and viewer. We are interested more in
what it does than what it is as an icon. The confrontation of art and
spectator, and the spectator's resultant self-perception, is an experience
rather than a meaning.

 

Referring to critics of Minimal Art, painter Frank Stella remarked: "If
you pin them down they always end up asserting that something is
present besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the
fact that only what can be seen there is there."28 Similarly, in
Wavelength there is no dependence on an idea or source of
motivation outside the work itself. The subject of the film is its own
structure and the concepts it suggests. (Snow: "My film is closer to
Vermeer than to Cézanne.”) But because Snow is working in the
medium of cinema, he must deal with the element of illusion, a
quality not inherent in painting or sculpture. The very essence of
cinema is the fact that what we see there is not there: time and
motion. These concepts have been engaged in recent traditional
cinema (Persona, Blow-Up, David Holzman's Diary), but always
symbolically, never in the empirical fashion of Snow's movie. Wavelength
is post-Minimal because, thanks to the cinema, it can deal
empirically with illusion, that is, a wider range of vision than usually

 

28 Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd,"Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New
York: Dutton Paperbacks, 1968), pp. 157-158.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Synaesthetic Cinema and Extra-Objective Reality 127

 

is engaged in the plastic arts. It is post-Warhol because it confronts
the illusory nature of cinematic reality; it presents not only "pure" time
and space, but also filmic time (fragmented) and space (twodimensional,
nonperspectival). It is more metaphysical than Minimal.
Wavelength is a romantic movie.

 

Snow emphasizes that editing is an abstraction of reality by
alternating times of day with each cut, and by cutting rarely. Thus he
achieves what Mondrian called the "relations" of abstract nature. The
theory of relativity reduces everything to relations; it emphasizes
structure, not material. We've been taught by modern science that
the so-called objective world is a relationship between the observer
and the observed, so that ultimately we are able to know nothing but
that relationship. Extra-objective art replaces object-consciousness
with metaphysical relation-consciousness. Romance is born in the
space between events.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age

 

The Rebirth of Cottage Industry

 

Just as the individual's unique identity is smothered by a social
system that prohibits education by experiment and restricts creative
living, so society itself as one organism suffers from the effects of
unilateral mass education inherent in the present public communications
network. Future historians would have a grossly inaccurate
picture of today's culture if they were to judge our social meanings
and values by the content of the so-called popular media.

 

Judging from broadcast television, for example, where the individual
has little choice of selection, a personality such as Glen
Campbell or a program like "Bonanza" might appear representative
of popular taste because their lowest-common-denominator appeal
satisfies the indiscriminate passivity of most of a hundred-million
viewers. However, if we judge the same society at the same time by
those media that offer personal selection and individual communication—
LP record albums, for example— we find the Beatles as the
representative image: two different worlds existing as one, distinguished
by the technologies through which they communicate. The
same phenomenon occurs in the cinema. The majority of college
students flock to movies like Easy Rider or Alice’s Restaurant, but
when they make their own movies it's a different story entirely. The
crucial difference is between mass public communication and private
individual communication.

 

But that difference is quickly being resolved. When the proliferation
of technology reaches a certain level of saturation in the
environment, we cease to be separate from it. Communications
technologies shape and record the objective and subjective realities
of Everyman. The intermedia network becomes metabolically and
homeostatically interfaced with each human being. To unplug any
one of the advanced nations from the global telephone network, for
example, would be a more extreme deterrent than any bomb; and the
global television linkages soon will become equally as vital.

 

In the past we've had two mass personalities: our media personality
and our "natural" personality. Pioneering radio and television

 

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Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age 129

 

announcers adopted a mode of speech and behavior essentially
unnatural, a formal way of talking and acting through the media. In a
sense, the media function as behavior-altering agents for special
occasions called "shows," much the same as alcohol is a behavior-
altering agent for special occasions called "cocktail parties." But the
recent phenomena of "underground" FM radio and "two-way" or
"conversation" radio and television are evidence that we're feeling
more comfortable with our extensions. Soon we'll converse as intimately
over television and radio as we do now over telephones. The
increasing number of twenty-four-hour all-news radio stations is a
symptom of humanity's growing awareness of the monitor function of
the media, even though today's profit-motive news might well be
described as tactical misinformation. The notion of putting on a
"show," although still prevalent in name at least, is losing its
meaning. Inevitably, show business is becoming communication
business, which in turn is becoming education business. And thus
begins the revolution.

 

The mass-audience, mass-consumption era is beginning to disintegrate
like Hesse's alter ego Harry Haller in Steppenwolf, who
regretted his dual nature until he realized that he not only had two
selves but quite literally dozens. It is generally accepted that the
post-Industrial Age will also be an age of post-mass consumption.
Cybernation virtually guarantees decentralization of energy sources.
There'll be no need for a "department" of water and power, for
example, when we learn to harness solar energy as easily as we
make transistor radios. Inherent in the proliferation of inexpensive
film technology, which caused the phenomenon of personal cinema,
is the force that soon will transform the socioeconomic system that
made commercial mass entertainment necessary in the first place.
Synaesthetic cinema not only is the end of movies as we've known
them aesthetically; the physical hardware of film technology itself is
quickly phasing out, and with it the traditional modes of filmmaking
and viewing. We're entering the era of image-publishing and image-
exchange, the inevitable evolutionary successor to book publishing:
the post-mass audience age.

 

The hardware and software environment presently exists in which
one can purchase films as easily as one purchases books or records.
The video/film symbiosis accomplished in electron-beam recording

 

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130 Expanded Cinema

 

results in the end of "movies" as social event and technical discipline.
The decisive factor in the demise of cinema and TV as we've
known them is the ability to choose information rather than being
enslaved to mass broadcasting schedules or distribution patterns,
restricted by both mode and (profit) motive. This revolutionary
capability exists even though the military/industrial complex withholds
it from us.

 

Although commercial restrictions are inevitable in the early stages
of the phenomenon, we shall soon find that the personal filmmaker is
equivalent to the major studio. It is now possible to collect hundreds
of cartridges of one's own synaesthetic cinema— images of one's
actual life preserved out of time— for documentation, post-stylization,
and study. For the first time in history every human now has the
ability to capture, preserve, and interpret those aspects of the living
present that are meaningful to him. The key word is interpret. In a
very real sense we can now show both our experiences and our
emotions to one another, rather than attempting to explain them in
verbally abstracted language. There's no semantic problem in a
photographic image. We can now see through each other's eyes,
moving toward expanded vision and inevitably expanded
consciousness.

 

DeMille's Ten Commandments and Brakhage's Dog Star Man both
go into the same ten-dollar cartridges, and then comes the test: the
ability to own and repeatedly view a film is conditional on the
availability of films worth multiple viewings. We shall find that ninety
percent of all cinema in history cannot be viewed more than a couple
of times and still remain interesting. No one is going to pay thirty
dollars to see a movie. The only films capable of supporting multiple
viewings, in the same way that paintings and records are enjoyed
repeatedly, are synaesthetic films in which the viewer is free to insert
himself into the experience differently each time. Thus the technology
that allowed synaesthetic cinema to exist on a mass scale in the
first place is the same technology that will force virtually all image-
making toward synaesthesis, the purest manifestation of consciousness.

 

The individual's ability to apprehend, capture, generate, transmit,
duplicate, replicate, manipulate, store, and retrieve audiovisual information
has reached the point where technology results in the re

 

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Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age131

 

birth of "cottage industry" as conceived by the economist William
Morris during the Industrial Revolution in England— the autonomous
ability of the individual to generate his own industry within his own
local environment. The primary difference between Morris' preindustrial
view and today's post-industrial reality is that cottage
industry and global cybernetic industrialization interpenetrate each
other's spheres of influence synergetically, each benefiting from the
other.

 

The introduction of videotape cartridges forces mass communications
into the untenable position of restricting individual freedom.
Shortly, the educational and aesthetic messages of society will be
communicated through cartridge-exchange and telecommand regional
videotape cable centers; live broadcast television will be free
to move information of a metabolic, homeostatic, interplanetary
nerve-system function. At present, videotape or filmed information
can be electron-beam recorded onto low-cost photosensitive material
which, in the example of Columbia's EVR, results in one-hour
cartridges of 180,000 black-and-white frames or half-hour cartridges
of 90,000 color frames. They can be displayed individually or sequentially
in random-access or automatic modes on any television set
with higher resolution than videotape systems or broadcast TV. The
system reduces broadcast videotape costs by a factor of fifty, home
videotape costs by ten, and is approximately one-fifteenth as expensive
as conventional filmmaking.

 

Coupled with other technologies such as the Polaroid family of
cameras, the videophone, and long-distance Xerography and Xerographic
telecopying, we arrive at a situation in which every TV image
and every frame of every videotape or movie in history can now be
filmed, taped, photographed, or copied in a number of ways, then
replicated and transmitted— all by the individual. The auteur theory
thus becomes utterly meaningless. We've progressed to the point at
which an "impersonal" or "official" film is unthinkable. There's no
such thing as an impersonal or nonauthored film: there is only honest
cinema and hypocritical cinema, and they are measured by the
difference between what is inside and what is outside of the maker's
consciousness. Art is both "adult" and personal: we begin with that
behind us, taken for granted, beneath discussion, and we go on from
there.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

132 Expanded Cinema

 

For thousands of young persons around the world today, the
cinema is a way of living. As we find ourselves faced with increasing
leisure time, the camera will become more important as an instrument
of creative living as opposed to its present role as conditioner
of the dronelike existence we now lead. I mean to suggest that the
camera— either cinema, or video, or both— as an extension of our
nervous system, functions as a superego that allows us to observe
and modify our behavior by observing our "software" image just as
world man modifies his behavior by observing his collective superego
as manifested in the global videosphere. By creating new
realities in video/cinema we create new realities in our lives. We
have seen that it is aesthetically and technically possible: let us now
briefly examine the process.

 

The ethnological filmmaker Jean Rouch, speaking of his cinémavérité
study, Chronicle of a Summer, described the superego function
of the camera with his subjects: "At first," he said, "there's a self-
conscious hamminess. They say to themselves, 'people are looking
at me and I must give a nice impression of myself.' But this lasts only
a very short time. And then, very rapidly, they begin to think— perhaps
for the first time sincerely— about their problems, about who
they are, and they begin to express what they have within themselves.
As the film progresses and the people see the rushes, they
begin to think about the character they were representing involuntarily—
a character of which they had been completely unaware, that
they discovered on the screen all of a sudden with enormous
surprise. And so the film becomes a reason for living and they feel
they must play that role. However, they will often deny the authenticity
of the film, claiming they w ere putting on for the camera,
because what has been revealed of them is so personal, a role which
normally they would not project to the world.

 

"But something very strange occurs: the cinema becomes for them
a pretext to try to resolve problems that they were not able to resolve
without the cinema. I'm convinced that ninety percent of what they
say is extremely sincere, and out of that they would never have had
the courage to say at least ten percent without the cinema. The
extraordinary pretext is, if you wish, the possibility to say something
in front of the camera and afterwards be able to retract it, saying it

 

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Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age 133

 

was just for the camera. The extraordinary possibility of playing a
role which is oneself, but which one can disavow because it is only
an image of oneself.”29

 

The new filmmaker no longer is required to make drama or to tell a
story or even to make "art," though art may certainly result. Personal
cinema becomes art when it moves beyond self-expression to
encompass life-expression. Art is not created; it is lived. The artist
merely reports it. Synaesthetic cinema is not filmed so much as
experienced onto film or videotape. As an extension of the citizen's
nervous system it can't be judged by the same canons that traditionally
have represented art. It's simply the first utterance of human
beings who've found a new language. If art is involved, it's the art of
creative living as opposed to passive conditioned response. The
possibility of realizing one's innermost desires with the excuse that
it's "just for the film" is a temptation that will be too strong to resist
when we're released from the needs of marginal survival. Wallace
Stevens: "It is the explanations of things that we make to ourselves
that disclose our character: the subjects of one's poem are the
symbols of one's self or one of one's selves."

 

Along with each man's life being the subject of his own study is the
need for each man to be consciously part of Man's life. "In dreams,"
said Yeats, "begin responsibilities." Buckminster Fuller has said that
the great aesthetic of tomorrow will be the aesthetic of integrity. For
ten thousand years more than five hundred generations of
agricultural men have lived abnormal, artificial lives of repetitiv e,
boring toil as energy slaves who must prove their right to live. But
now we are on the threshold of freedom. We are about to become
our own gods. We are about to face the problem of values.
Bronowski: "The problem of values arises only when men try to fit
together their need to be social animals with their need to be free
men. There is no problem, there are no values, until men want to do
both."30

 

For the first time in history we're approaching that point at which
both will be possible if we fashion our lives with a sense of integrity.

 

29"Jean Rouch in Conversation with James Blue,"Film Comment (Fall-Winter, 1967), pp.
84-85.
30Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1965), p 55.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

134 Expanded Cinemas

 

We've modified our environment so radically that we must now
modify ourselves in order to exist in it. If we're all to become one, the
ethics of individual man must become a meta-ethic for global man.
Donald Schon: "In seeking a meta-ethic we suffer from the fact that
society traditionally delegates the job of change to special
individuals in its midst, to artists, inventors and scientists— and then
isolates them from the rest of society in order to preserve the illusion
of stability of norms and objectives.''31

 

Not only must we completely revise our attitudes toward "ownership"
of the physical earth; we must also learn to accept the fact that
the ideas and creations of humanity do not belong to any one
individual. Thus technology not only helps maintain the present level
of mankind's integrity, it actually forces us to increase that integrity
and provides the social framework within which to begin. Freedom is
the acceptance of responsibility. Bronowski speaks of the "habit of
truth" as it applies to scientific experiments. Contemporary man in
general might be said to practice a habit of hypocrisy: "There is no
more threatening and no more degrading doctrine than the fancy that
somehow we may shelve the responsibility for making the decisions
of our society by passing it to a few scientists armored with a special
magic. The world today is made and powered by science; for any
man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes
toward slavery."32

 

The irresponsible audience will learn responsibility when it becomes
its own audience through the synaesthetic research of expanded
cinema and image-exchange. And in this activity it will come
to discover the scientific meta-ethic. "The practice of science
compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of
universal values... the exactness of science can give a context for
our nonscientific judgments."33 By its very nature synaesthetic cinema
will close the gap between art and science because the art of
creative living must become a science if life is to hold any meaning
in the Cybernetic Age.

 

31Donald Schon, Technology and Change (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 24.
32Bronowski, pp. 5, 6.
33 Ibid., p. xiii.

 

 ARTSCILAB 2001

 

PART THREE:
TOWARD COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

 

"If you look back in history you'll find that the artist and the scientist are
inseparable. In many ways the artist's work is identical with scientific exploration.
The artist is able to focus more in the area of consciousness, but with the same
scientific zeal. Yet cosmic consciousness is not limited to the scientist. In fact
scientists are sometimes the last to know."

 

JORDAN BELSON

 

We've followed the evolution of image language to its limits: the end
of fiction, drama, and realism as they have been traditionally
understood. Conventional cinema can be pushed no further. To
explore new dimensions of awareness requires new technological
extensions. Just as the term "man" is coming to mean man/plant/
machine, so the definition of cinema must be expanded to include
videotronics, computer science, atomic light. Before discussing
those technologies, however, we must first ask ourselves what these
new dimensions of awareness might be. In the language of
synaesthetics we have our structural paradigm. What concepts are
we to explore with it?

 

We could say that art isn't truly contemporary until it relates to the
world of cybernetics, game theory, the DNA molecule, Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle, theories of antimatter, transistorization, the
breeder reactor, genocidal weaponry, the laser, pre-experiencing
alternative futures. But this purely scientific portrait of modern
existence is only partially drawn. As Louis Pauwels has observed:
"We are living at a time when science has entered the spiritual
universe. It has transformed the mind of the observer himself, raising
it to a plane which is no longer that of scientific intelligence, now
proved to be inadequate.''1 Man no longer is earthbound. We move
now in sidereal time. We must expand our horizons beyond the

 

1Pauwels, Bergier, op. cit., p. 62.

 

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136 Expanded Cinema

 

point of infinity. We must move from oceanic consciousness to
cosmic consciousness.

 

At their present limits astrophysics, biochemistry, and conceptual
mathematics move into metaphysical territory. Mysticism is upon us:
it arrives simultaneously from science and psilocybin. Pauwels:
"Modern science, once freed from conformism, is seen to have ideas
to exchange with the magicians, alchemists and wonder-workers of
antiquity. A revolution is taking place before our eyes— the
unexpected remarriage of reason and intuition."2

 

Art and science have achieved extremely sophisticated levels of
abstraction. They have in fact reached that point at which the
abstract becomes extra-objective. Post-Euclidean geometry, for
example, precludes any exact visualization of a stable space grid.
We are confronted with dynamic interaction between several
transfinite space systems. Precise focusing is impossible. (John
Cage: "A measurement measures measuring means.”) And the
content of modern art tends increasingly toward the conceptual— i.e.,
decision-making, systems aesthetics, environmental problems of
"impossible" art.

 

What we "know" conceptually has far outstripped what we
experience empirically. We are finally beginning to accept the fact
that our senses allow us to perceive only one-millionth of what we
know to be reality— the electromagnetic spectrum. Ninety-nine
percent of all vital forces affecting our life is invisible. Most of the
fundamental rates of change can't be apprehended sensorially.
Fuller: "Better than ninety-nine percent of modern technology occurs
in the realm of physical phenomena that aresub or ultra to the range
of human visibility. We can see the telephone wires but not the
conversations taking place. We can see the varieties of metal parts
of airplanes but there is nothing to tell us how relatively strong these
metals are in comparison to other metals. None of these varieties
can be told from the others by the human senses, not even by
metallurgists when unaided by instruments. The differences are
invisible. Yet world society has throughout its millions of years on
earth made its judgments on visible, tangible, sensorially
demonstrable criteria."3

 

2 Ibid., p. xxii.
3 R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, p. 64.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Toward Cosmic Consciousness 137

 

So we see— that is, we don't see— that our physical environment
itself has drastically altered the classical definition of artistic purpose
as articulated by Conrad Fiedler: "Artistic activity begins when man
finds himself face to face with the visible world as with something
immensely enigmatical... In the creation of a work of art, man
engages in a struggle with nature not for his physical but for his
mental existence."4

 

It is the invisible and inconceivable that man finds immensely
enigmatical and to which he has turned his conceptual capacities.
Not only is drama obsolete but in a very real sense so is the finite
world out of which drama traditionally has risen. The concerns of
artist and scientist today are transfinite. McLuhan: "Electricity points
the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a
world scale, and without any verbalization whatever."5

 

The Paleocybernetic Age witnesses the concretization of intuition
and the secularization of religion through electronics. Nam June
Paik: "Electronics is essentially Oriental... but don't confuse
'electronic' with 'electric' as McLuhan often does. Electricity deals
with mass and weight; electronics deals with information: one is
muscle, the other is nerve." This is to say that global man in the final
third of the twentieth century is witnessing the power of the
intangible over the tangible. "When Einstein wrote the equation
E=mc2 , the metaphysical took the measure of, and mastered, the
physical. Nothing in our experience suggests that energy could
comprehend and write the equation of intellect... [Einstein's]
equation is operating inexorably, and the metaphysical is now
manifesting its ability to reign over the physical."6

 

In addition to a radical reassessment of inner space, the new age
is characterized by the wholesale obsolescence of man's historical
view of outer space. Lunar observatories and satellite telescopes,
free from the blinders of earth's air-ocean, will effect a quantum leap
in human knowledge comparable to that which the microscope
provided at the end of the nineteenth century. Until 1966, for ex

 

4 Conrad Fiedler, On Judging Works of Visual Art, trans. Henry Shaefer-Simmern and
Fulmer Mood (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1949), p. 48.5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 80.
6 Fuller, Spaceship Earth, p. 36.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

138 Expanded Cinema

 

ample, all of astronomy indicated that the planet Mercury did not
rotate. Radar observations now reveal that it turns on its axis every
fifty-nine days. Similar embarrassing reversals of generations-old
opinions about Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and even our own moon have
occurred within the last decade.7

 

We are entering a transfinite realm of physical and metaphysical
mysteries that have nothing to do with fiction. It is now recognized
that science has come closer to whatever God may be than has the
church in all its tormented history. Science continually discovers and
reaffirms the existence of what Fuller calls "an a priori metaphysical
intelligence omni-operative in the Universe." Scientists find that a
vast omni-present intellect pervades every atom of the universe,
governing the structure and behavior of all physical phenomena. Yet
this intelligence itself, which we identify as "the laws of nature," is
purely metaphysical and is totally unpredicted by the behaviors of
any of the physical parts. Einstein's E=mc2 is science's most
comprehensive formulation of that intelligence. As J. B. S. Haldane
once said, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is
stranger than we can imagine."

 

7 Arthur C. Clarke, "Next— The Planets," Playboy (March, 1969), p. 100.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

2001: The New Nostalgia

 

The year 2000, although universally accepted as a rather
apocalyptic millennial symbol, does not begin the twenty-first
century. A difference of twelve months may seem relatively insignificant
today, but in the onrushing accelerations of radical evolution
many worlds can come and go in the period of a year. Already the
focus of the arts, especially cinema, has shifted toward cosmic
consciousness. "The consequences of the images," said McLuhan,
"will be the images of the consequences." A completely new
vocabulary of graphic language is available to the image-maker now
that our video senses have extended to Mars and beyond.

 

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the last film in
history forced to rely on synthetic images of heavenly bodies. One
measure of radical evolution is the way in which Kubrick's images of
the earth and moon, so utterly realistic not long ago, have become
pallid in contrast with the actual images themselves. We've
confronted a larger reality: there no longer is a need to represent
cosmic consciousness through fiction. Just as synaesthetic cinema
renders fiction obsolete, so do the technologies that enable us to
traverse the planets and to invent the future. The old Hollywood
cliché "filmed on location" assumes staggering implications.

 

In many respects 2001 is an epochal achievement of cinema; in
other ways, however, it is marred by passages of graceless
audience manipulation and vulgar expositional devices that would
embarrass artists of lesser talent than Kubrick. But the movie
unquestionably is a phenomenal experience, and even though it
begins to pale after a couple of viewings, its contributions to the state
of the art and to mass-audience commercial cinema cannot be
overlooked or overrated. Because of this movie a great number of
persons have been able to understand something of the spiritualism
in science. And though it is rather symptomatic of an unfortunate
syndrome having to do with the feared "dehumanizing" effects of
advanced technology, 2001 did create an impressive sense of space
and time relationships practically without precedent in the cinema. A
technical masterpiece, but a thematic mishmash of nineteenth

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

140 Expanded Cinema

 

and twentieth-century confusions, which demonstrates that it is not
so much a film of tomorrow as a trenchant reflection of contemporary
sentiments solidly based in the consciousness of today. Still, it was
more than we might have hoped it would be.

 

In casting its vision to the stars, 2001 returns full circle to the
origins of human curiosity. One of mankind's oldest recorded
thoughts has to do with the cyclic unity and simultaneous
regeneration of the universe. In the texts of ancient Sanskrit is the
notion that the universe dies and is reborn with every breath we
draw. To a certain extent this has been substantiated by the studies
of modern physics, which reveal that elemental changes at the
atomic and subatomic levels are total and instantaneous, while the
macro-system of the cosmologically vast universe itself is constantly
in metamorphosis. In Vishvasara Tantra, which includes one of
man's earliest attempts at explaining the formation of matter, we find
the prophetic conclusion, "What is here is elsewhere; what is not
here is nowhere."

 

These concepts are virtually embodied in the design of2001, from
its higher ordering principle— that mankind's dawn is a continual
process of death and rebirth— through each of its parts, none of
which predicts the behavior of the whole. The film moves with an
implacable and purposive grace through a richly-connected
allegorical structure that recalls Ortega y Gasset's "higher algebra of
metaphors." Encompassing the whole is the sexual/genetic
metaphor in which rockets are ejaculated from a central slit in Hilton
Space Station No. 5, and a sperm-shaped spacecraft named
Discovery (i.e., birth) emits a pod that carries its human seed
through a Stargate womb to eventual death and rebirth as the
Starchild Embryo. Within this macrostructure we find endless variations
such as the prehistoric bone that becomes a spinning space
station, one of the most tasteful allegorical transitions in the history
of a medium given to rather grandiose symbolism.

 

The behavior and ultimate deactivation of the berserk computer
HAL might be viewed as a metaphor for the end of logic. It is
established that HAL, who not only "thinks" but also "feels,"
represents the highest achievement of human intelligence. The
machine is singing "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true" (a
computer recording of which actually was made ten years ago) when

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

2001: The New Nostalgia 141

 

the cybernetic lobotomy renders it senseless. Immediately after, the
astronaut encounters the alien monolith in crucifix-alignment with a
string of asteroids and is seduced through the Stargate into a
dimension "beyond infinity"— that is, beyond logic.

 

In this domain far from any galaxy we know, the human finds
himself in austere Regency chambers with an aqueous video-like
atmosphere, constructed by whispering omniscient aliens to make
him comfortable during the lifetime he is to spend under their
scrutiny. He is kept ultra-healthy and lives to a very old age. This is
depicted through a kind of metaphorical time-lapse in which the
astronaut undergoes a series of self-confrontations, aging each time.
At last he gazes toward a bed in which is lying an image of himself
so old and emaciated that he incredibly resembles the humanoid
apes of "The Dawn of Man." This primitive creature timidly lifts its
palsied hand in archetypal gesture toward the metallic monolith that
towers in the center of the glowing room.

 

Suddenly there appears the cosmic image that began the film and
constitutes a kind of metaphysical leitmotiv of transcendental
Cartesian beauty: in deep space we are levitated near a huge
planet, its crest illumined by starlight. Another globe rises behind and
directly in line with the first; and now, with a blinding starburst and
Strauss's paean to Nietzsche, a fiery sun appears behind the second
planet, completing the geometrical assembly of heavenly bodies. A
timeless unforgettable image that suggests, almost surrealistically,
some higher order, some transcending logic far beyond human
intelligence. 2001 is Stanley Kubrick's interstellar morality play.

 

There is, however, a fundamental disunity between the film's
conceptual and design information. Its adherence to a Minimalist
aesthetic of primary structures is starkly contrasted against the
confusion of its ideas. And whereas it is structurally uneven, there
are moments when form and content seem flawlessly synthesized.
The elegant simplicity of its architectural trajectories is the harmonic
opposite of its galactic polymorphism. And what might be described
as its "aesthetics of space tooling" has captured the imagination of a
society steeped in the vulgar bric-a-brac of postwar architecture. It
has become a kind of cinematic Bauhaus.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

142 Expanded Cinema

 

Mystical alignment of planets and sun in the
Stanley Kubrick production 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Photo: courtesy of MGM Studios.

 

Central to this tremendous cultural influence, and in spite of the
film's many confusions, is Kubrick's intuitive grasp of what I call the
new nostalgia. It pervades the entire film, but particularly the
sequence in which Gary Lockwood aboard theDiscovery receives a
videophone birthday message from his earthbound parents. The
crucial effect is Kubrick's use of the adagio from Aram Khachaturian's
Gayane Ballet Suite. The music— mournful, melancholy, with
a sense of transcendental beauty— invests the scene with an
overwhelming mood that invites only one interpretation: it is obviously
a sad event.

 

This sadness is a manifestation of the new nostalgia: the astronaut
is a child of the new age, a man of cosmic consciousness. Not only
does he live in a different world from his parents on a conceptual
level, he has physically left their natural world and all of its values. Of
what possible significance could a birthday be to him? He doesn't
even share a common definition of life with his parents. His
companions aboard the Discovery are preserved in a cryogenetic
state of suspended animation.

 

Yet the sequence has been widely interpreted as an indictment of
the "dehumanizing" effects of technology. The astronaut is seen as a
kind of "space zombie" because he appears indifferent to the
effusions of his parents. In fact, the music functions not as
commentary on the action but as an evocation of the Astronaut's
realization of a generation gap both physical and metaphysical.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

2001: The New Nostalgia 143

 

That he's not particularly demonstrative in the usual messy way
suggests nothing so much as a sense of integrity. To find him inhuman
is equivalent to Camus' Magistrate accusing Mersault of not
loving his mother.

 

To understand this generation gap, we must realize that the melancholy
of the new nostalgia arises not out of sentimental remembrance
of things past, but from an awareness of radical
evolution in the living present. When Sartre wrote about Existentialism,
it was not popularly recognized as being inherent in daily experience;
it was a concept, a theory, else there would have been no
need for Sartre to formulate an entire cosmology upon it. But through
electronic technology, Existentialism becomes daily experience. We
are transformed by time through living within it; but technologies
such as television displace the individual from participant to observer
of the human pageant, and thus we live effectively "outside" of time;
we externalize and objectify what previously was subjectively
integral to our own self-image. The result is an inevitable sense of
melancholy and nostalgia, not for the past, but for our inability to
become integral with the present. We are all outsiders.

 

The new nostalgia also is a result of Western culture's
transformation from sacred to secular: "Sacred societies resist
change, unable to accept or value the new or untraditional. Secular
societies, a relatively modern development, are oriented toward
change, consciously seek out and value new and untraditional ways.
Sacred societies are oriented toward the past; secular societies
toward the future."8 Ironically, no sooner has Existentialism moved
from theory to experience than it is given a new dimension by
science, which has replaced the church as our temple of worship
and has disclosed man's teleologic, anti-entropic function in the
universe, something the church never was able to do.

 

But the scientific method is, by its very nature, nonsacred.
Everything is open to challenge. Thus the new nostalgia is a
symptom of our realization that nothing is sacred. This produces a
tendency to dissociate and distance oneself from all previously
coveted phenomena that have provided continuity as landmarks of
the soul. Most of mankind's ancient dreams have become realities;

 

8John McHale, The Future of the Future (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1969), p. 24.

 

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144 Expanded Cinema

 

the speed of change has caught us without new dreams to replace
the old, because the world of tomorrow is elsewhere and
unthinkable.

 

We find, moreover, that the new nostalgia is a symptom of the
death of history. The more we learn about the present, about
humanity's perception and interpretation of the present, the more
suspect history becomes. When Fuller remarks that our most
polluted resource is the "tactical information" (news) to which
humanity spontaneously reflexes, he echoes Hermann Hesse's view
that "history's third dimension is always fiction." The present has
discredited the past, while the history of the present is recorded by
machines, not "written" by men, and is thus out of our hands as a
"man-made" phenomenon. "The computer," says McLuhan, "abolishes
the human past by making it entirely present." We don't "remember"
the assassination of John F. Kennedy because we never
experienced it directly in the first place. For millions of people who
were not actually present in Dallas, Kennedy's death exists only in
the endless technologically-sustained present. We "remember" it in
the same way that we first "knew" it— through the media— and we
can experience it again each time the videotapes are played. Since
we see and hear and feel only the conditioning of our own memory,
a great flood of nostalgia is generated when technology erases the
past and with it our self-image.

 

The new nostalgia also is a result of humanity's inevitable
symbiosis with the hallucinogens of the ecology. First, man's image
of himself as discretely separate from the surrounding biosphere is
shaken by his discovery of the a priori biochemical relationship
between his brain and the humble plant. Second, in the consciousness-
expansion of the drug experience, the overwhelming
emotion is one of remembering something that one has forgotten,
something one "knew" long, long ago in the forgotten recesses of the
mind. The deja vu of the drug experience results from the discovery
of how much is absent in "normal" perception of the present, not the
past. Although 2001 contains no specific allusions to drug
experiences, the subject is indirectly suggested in the Stargate
Corridor sequence, which might well be interpreted as a drug-trip
allegory.

 

 But perhaps the most profound aspect of the new nostalgia is
what we call the generation gap, which is totally a result of the
unprecedented sudden influx of information. The past is discredited

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

2001: The New Nostalgia 145

 

Starchild Embryo from the Stanley Kubrick
production 2001: A Space Odyssey. "The
image of the Starchild, its umbilical feeding
from no earthly womb, elegantly symbolizes
a generation gap so sudden and so profound
that few of us believed it possible."
Photo: courtesy of MGM Studios.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

146 Expanded Cinema

 

but continues to inform a present in which new information has
revealed us in a completely new perspective. The information implosion,
as revised self-knowledge, sheds un-relenting and inadvertently
cruel light upon the illusions of the past, of which our parents
are victims. We find, as Hesse did, that "world history taken as a
whole by no means furthered what was desirable, rational, and
beautiful in the life of man, but at best only tolerated it as an exception."
9

 

For the first time in history, an entire generation abruptly discovers
that its legacy of love has been tragically ill-served: "Humanity is
characterized by extraordinary love for its new life, and yet has been
misinforming its new life to such an extent that the new life is
continually at a greater disadvantage than it would be if abandoned
in the wilderness by its parents."10 The image of the Starchild
Embryo at the conclusion of 2001, its umbilical feeding from no
Earthly womb, elegantly symbolizes a generation gap so sudden and
so profound that few of us believed it possible. As we unlearn our
past, we unlearn our selves. This is the new nostalgia, not for the
past because there is no past, and not for the future because there
are no parameters by which to know it.

 

The Cybernetic Age is the new Romantic Age. Nature once again
has become an open empire as it was in the days when man thought
of the earth as flat and extending on to infinity. When science
revealed the earth as spherical, and thus a closed system, we were
able to speak of parameters and romance was demystified into
Existentialism. But we've left the boundaries of earth and again have
entered an open empire in which all manner of mysteries are
possible. Beyond infinity lurk demons who guard the secrets of the
cosmos. We are children embarking on a journey of discovery. "The
same extraordinary intellectual forces with which man is remolding
his planet are now being turned in upon himself. The results of this
inner exploration may be infinitely more powerful than any physically-
extended voyage to Mars or the bottom of the sea.''11

 

9Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.,
1969), p. 150.
10R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1962), p. 9.
11John McHale, "Man +," Architectural Design (February, 1967), pp. 87, 88.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

2001: The New Nostalgia147

 

Kubrick himself demonstrated his awareness of the new nostalgia
when he quoted Carl Jung's remarks on possible consequences of
contact with advanced alien intelligence: ". . . reins would be torn
from our hands and we would find ourselves without dreams... we
would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as
to leave us completely paralyzed.''12

 

I interviewed Arthur C. Clarke, coauthor of 2001, who has been
chiefly responsible for elevating science fiction from pulp to profundity.
I was accompanied by Ted Zatlyn, then editor of the Los
Angeles Free Press. We suggested that the film's depiction of the
man/machine symbiosis as ominous and threatening might have
been irresponsible.

 

CLARKE: It could be irresponsible, yes. But the novel explains why
HAL did this and of course the film never gave any explanation of
his behavior. So from that point of view it differs from the novel. I
personally would like to have seen a rationale for HAL's behavior.
It's perfectly understandable and in fact makes HAL a very
sympathetic character because he's been fouled up by these clods
back at Mission Control, you see. And in a way it's more pro-
machine than pro-human, if you analyze the philosophy behind the
novel. I included a sort of emotional passage about Hal’s electronic
Eden and so on. But it would have been almost impossible to give
the logical explanation of just why HAL did what he did. It would
have slowed things down too much. So it had to be treated on this
sort of na?ve and conventional level. Then there was the straightforward
matter of dramatic content. One had to have some kind of
dramatic tension and suspense and conflict. And Hal’s episode is
the only conventional dramatic element in the whole film. And so in
that way you might say that it was rather contrived. We set out
quite consciously and deliberately— calculatedly, if you like— to
create a myth, an adventure, but still be totally plausible, realistic,
intelligent. We weren't going to have any blonde stowaway in the
airlock and all this sort of nonsense that you've seen in the past.
This immediately limited our options enormously. There are fairly
few things that can happen on a space mission. Especially if the
men have been carefully selected psychologically and so on— all

 

12 Stanley Kubrick interviewed in Playboy (September, 1968), p. 96.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

148 Expanded Cinema

 

the things which make astronauts such undramatic characters. You
don't have nervous breakdowns or Caine Mutinies on a spaceship.

 

TED: Do you see the hippie phenomenon as an evolutionary
process similar to what you described in Childhood's End? Many
aspects of what we call the hippie movement were almost
prophesied in that book, especially the idea of an awakened moral
conscience among youth.

 

CLARKE: Yes, at one point I had a subtitle for 2001 which was
Childhood's Beginning.

 

TED: But in another way there seems to be a contradiction between
2001 and Childhood's End. In an evolutionary sense. In 2001 the
idea of an evolving expansion of consciousness seems directly
opposed to extending the American capitalistic free-enterprise
system into outer space. I mean with Howard Johnson and Pan-
Am businesses.

 

CLARKE: That was done primarily to establish a background of
realism to achieve total acceptance by the audience.

 

GENE: Yes, but you see this is exactly what we feel is rather
unfortunate about the film. I mean that's all very fine, and it works,
and everyone likes that, they think it's clever and all. But in fact
how "realistic" is capitalistic free enterprise at that advanced stage
in man's evolution? And to suggest such a thing— even to suggest
"ownership" in space is perhaps a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy. We
are what we think the future will be.

 

CLARKE: But that doesn't necessarily mean capitalistic free
enterprise. Pan-Am is running the range for NASA, but that doesn't
necessarily mean a capitalistic system. Names hang on, that's all. I
mean Hilton is planning a space-station hotel. He gave a talk and
showed designs three years ago.

 

TED: But tile obvious extension of that idea is spherical influence in
space— Russia's sphere here, America's sphere here, China's
sphere over there. I just don't think that when man evolves to the
point where he can travel throughout the universe, using new
energy sources and so on, that he will carry with him an archaic
form of thinking.

 

CLARKE: Well, of course, he won't. Things will change completely.
But the events of 2001 are only thirty years from now. And a lot of

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

2001: The New Nostalgia 149

 

these things will still be around. The names anyway. Just as the
Catholic Church still exists in name. In fact, if I'd done 2001 by
myself I'd have had an international organization instead of
nationalism. But here again you're constrained by practical
matters— this is an American film made by an American company
and there are a lot of problems. For example at one point we were
saying we should have at least one token black in the crew. But
when your crew is only two people it would be so obvious. I mean
can you see Bill Cosby in there? So finally we said the hell with it.

 

GENE: Science fiction has had a new image for the last few years, a
new respectability. In fact, most people are now willing to accept
the fact that there is nothing but science fiction.

 

CLARKE: I've been saying for years that mainstream literature is a
small subsection of science fiction. Because science fiction is
about everything.

 

GENE: Exactly. And one of the significant aspects of 2001 is that it's
science fact. When you discuss science and what it's doing, you're
not only discussing the present but the past and the future
simultaneously. Because science encompasses what has been
and what will be all in the moment, the present. So the idea of
science fiction no longer is meaningful.

 

CLARKE: One reason older people dislike 2001 is they realize it's
about reality and it scares the hell out of them. This film is about
the two most important realities of the future: development of
intelligent machines, and contact with higher alien intelligence.
Which of course may be machines themselves. I suspect that all
really higher intelligences will be machines. Unless they're beyond
machines. But biological intelligence is a lower form of intelligence,
almost inevitably. We're in an early stage in the evolution of
intelligence but a late stage in the evolution of life. Real intelligence
won't be living.

 

GENE: I understand your meaning of that idea as a beneficial thing
in which man is rendered obsolete as a specialist, obsolete as all
the things he's been up to now— obsolete in comparison to the
computer's ability to do all these things better and quicker— but, on
the other hand, man is then totally free to live comprehensively,
nonspecialized, like the freedom of children.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

150 Expanded Cinema

 

CLARKE: That's how I ended one of my essays on the subject. I
said "Now it's time to play." The goal of the future is total
unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the
present politico-economic system.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Stargate Corridor

 

The conceptual deficiencies of 2001 are somewhat redeemed by its
sophisticated deployment of cinematic technology. For the first time
in commercial cinema we are given the state of the art at its highest
point of refinements.13 2001 has become the higher ordering
principle by which all commercial cinema must be measured.

 

Douglas Trumbull, a twenty-five-year-old artist/technologist, was
one of four special effects supervisors on the project. The so-called
slit-scan machine, which created the Stargate Corridor sequence,
was one of several pieces of equipment Trumbull developed especially
for this film. Though much of its impact is due to the
Cinerama format (16mm. versions are not nearly so impressive), the
sequence was nevertheless a breakthrough in commercial cinema.
Although this particular approach to the slit-scan was developed by
Trumbull, the technique does have precedent in the work of John
Whitney.

 

According to Trumbull, the original screenplay called for a giant
tetrahedron that would be discovered in orbit around Jupiter. This
was because there is, in fact, a strange perturbation of one of
Jupiter's moons. Astronomers have noted that it appears to grow
larger and smaller at certain points in its orbit. "So Clarke said
maybe it's not a moon at all," Trumbull recalls. "Maybe it's some sort
of object that presents a larger and smaller size as it rotates. So the
spacemen arrive and it's this huge tetrahedron with a hole in it. He
positions his pod over the hole, looks down through, and can see
into another dimension. The tetrahedron may be superimposed over
Jupiter but he sees stars through the hole: a time gate."

 

TRUMBULL: We spent a long time drawing tetrahedrons with holes
in them and it all looked corny. It was never right. Then someone
thought of having a giant hole or slot directly in one of the moons.
The spaceman is orbiting around one of the moons and finds a

 

13 Extensive details on the production of 2001 were published in The American
Cinematographer (June, 1968).

 

151

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

152 Expanded Cinema

 

Slit-scan Stargate Corridor from
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Stargate Corridor 153

 

hole in it. We drew pictures of that and they looked pretty stupid.
Finally Kubrick came up with the idea of the big slab. He always
insisted on super-simple symmetrical forms rather than anything
which would deviate artistically from the simplest approach.

 

One of the very last things we did was adding the mystical
symmetry. The Jupiter sequence culminates in a shot in which the
moons and asteroids are aligned and the mysterious slab is seen
perpendicular to them like a crucifix. It wasn't intended to be that,
but that's the way it came out. So when we saw what we had, we
worked back from that point and created similar scenes earlier in
the film. For example, when the apemen are looking up at the slab
and suddenly there's this symmetrical alignment of the sun and the
moon over the slab— that was put in long after the sequence was
shot. Then we went back to the point where they discover the slab
on the moon and inserted the same imagery for that sequence.
This was all second-guessing but it was meant to suggest the
same ideas as one finds behind similar imagery in mystical
literature and symbols.

 

There was always the idea that Keir Dullea would go into a time-
warp or some kind of "psychedelic" corridor, but we didn't know
how to get him into it. What do we do with him? Does he fall into a
hole or what? It was completely unresolved. The special effects
people came up with corny things with mirrors that looked terrible.
So I stumbled onto this idea through fragments of information
about what John Whitney was doing with scanning slits that move
across the lens creating optical warps. I figured why couldn't you
have a slit that starts far away and moves toward the camera?
Rather than moving laterally, why can't it move dimensionally?

 

So I did a simple test on the Oxberry animation stand. It was
rigged with a Polaroid camera so you could take Polaroid pictures
of any setup immediately to see how it looked. So I just ran the
camera up and down and juggled some slits and funny pieces of
artwork around, and I found out that you could in fact scan an
image onto an oblique surface. That whole idea expanded and I

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

154 Expanded Cinema

 

built this huge thing that occupied about 50,000 square feet. It
produced the effect which I call the Slit-Scan Effect.

 

Similar to image-scanning techniques used in scientific and
industrial photography, Trumbull's process was totally automated
through an impressive battery of selsyn drives, timers, sequencers,
and camera controls. Basically it involved a standard 65mm. Mitchell
camera mounted on a fifteen-foot track leading to a screen with a
narrow vertical slit in its center. Behind the screen was a powerful
light source focused through several horizontally-shifting glass
panels painted with abstract designs and colors.

 

When the camera is at the "stop" position at the far end of the
fifteen-foot track, the illuminated slit is framed exactly in the center of
the lens. The standard shutter is taken out of phase and held wide
open. An auxiliary shutter is built onto the front of the lens that opens
to F 1.8 when the camera begins to track toward the screen. One
single frame of film is exposed during the sixty-second period in
which the camera tracks from fifteen feet to within one and one-half
inches of the screen. The camera lens is attached to a bellows
mount on a camshaft rotating from a selsyn linked to a drive motor,
all of which maintains perfect focus and depth-of-field the entire
distance of the one-minute track.

 

When the camera reaches the screen it has veered one-half of a
frame either right or left of the slit. The exposure thus produced on
the single frame is a controlled blur, much the same as time
exposures of freeways at night that produce streaks of red taillights.
The shifting panels of painted glass behind the slit alter the pattern of
light coming through the slit as the camera approaches, producing
an uneven or streaked blur. When the process is repeated for both
sides of the frame, the effect is of an infinite corridor of lights and
shapes advancing at enormous velocity.

 

The glass panes behind the slit are shifted horizontally by selsyns
and advancing motors synchronized with the tracking camera. Thus
the exposure pattern is identical for each frame of film except that a
differential mechanism displaces the entire rig slightly for each
camera run, creating an impression that the scanned image is
moving.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Stargate Corridor 155

 

Slit-scan machine built by Douglas Trumbull
for the Stargate Corridor sequence of
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

The slit-scan is not limited to this application. As we shall see later,
John Whitney, Jr., has constructed a computerized, hybrid optical
printer that automatically scans a projected motion-picture sequence.
In addition, the camera need not track perpendicular to the
scanned image; a diagonal approach would create effects of warped
perspective in otherwise representational imagery.

 

TRUMBULL: There was one short slit-scan sequence— a bad take,
actually— which started out black and instead of having walls of
color come at you it had little points of light which were parts of the
artwork before it actually developed into walls. It started out black,
then a few little red sparks came out, and then a few more and it
generated more and more. That particular shot was done with a
device I rigged for automatically accelerating the speed. So as the
dots were coming up it was accelerating at such an incredible rate

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

156 Expanded Cinema

 

that we used up all the artwork in a couple of seconds. Though the
shot is brief it was the only one with a transitional effect: it started
out black and slowly became something.

 

We had a double-projection technique in which we could run two
aligned 35mm. projectors simultaneously onto one screen to see
how two elements looked together. So that was how we figured out
the way of getting the astronaut into the Stargate sequence: we
shot a scene just panning away from Jupiter out into deep space
and faded in that little slit-scan footage which gave us our transition
into the time-warp. At the same time we were shooting the slab
floating around Jupiter. There was a physical problem in getting the
slab out of the frame without matching the camera movement with
the animation pan. So we decided to have it just fade out between
the planets: the slab fades, and as the slit-scan comes in the stars
fade out. It's strange how solutions to technical problems become
the content of the film.

 

If one considers the introduction of sound and then color as
successive "generations" in the history of cinema, it is possible to
say that we've entered the fourth generation by marrying basic
cinematic techniques to computer and video sciences. There have
been no fundamental breakthroughs in the nature of cinema since its
conception. In one sense the history of film is but a footnote to
Lumière and Méliès. But the technological revolution begins the new
age of cinema. Before moving into computer films, however, we'll
discuss the work of Jordan Belson, who both preceded and
surpassed 2001 in the realm of cinematic innovations. Although not
as technologically sophisticated as Kubrick's enterprise, Belson's
films achieve a sense of cosmic consciousness only hinted at in
2001, and levels of design with far greater integrity and vision.

 

With a tiny fraction of the manpower, equipment, and money
expended in the production of2001, Belson has created images and
moods of far wider significance and lasting beauty. While the state of
the art remains relatively untapped, Belson, working with limited
resources, has demonstrated its potential. He's a visionary who has
broken through to the other side; the state of the art need only follow.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson

 

"Only the fantastic is likely to be true at the cosmic level."

 

TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

 

Certain phenomena manage to touch a realm of our consciousness
so seldom reached that when it is awakened we are shocked and
profoundly moved. It's an experience of self-realization as much as
an encounter with the external world. The cosmic films of Jordan
Belson possess this rare and enigmatic power.

 

Basic to this enigma is the disconcerting fact that Belson's work
seems to reside equally in the physical and metaphysical. Any
discussion of his cinema becomes immediately subjective and
symbolic, as we shall soon see. Yet the undeniable fact of their
concrete nature cannot be stressed too frequently. Piet Mondrian: "In
plastic art, reality can be expressed only through the equilibrium of
dynamic movement of form and color. Pure means afford the most
effective way of attaining this.''14

 

The essence of cinema is precisely "dynamic movement of form
and color," and their relation to sound. In this respect Belson is the
purest of all filmmakers. With few exceptions his work is not
"abstract." Like the films of Len Lye, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger,
and the Whitneys, it is concrete. Although a wide variety of meaning
inevitably is abstracted from them, and although they do hold quite
specific implications for Belson personally, the films remain concrete,
objective experiences of kinaesthetic and optical dynamism. They
are at once the ultimate use of visual imagery to communicate
abstract concepts, and the purest of experiential confrontations
between subject and object.

 

In their amorphous, gaseous, cloudlike imagery it is color, not line,
which defines the forms that ebb and flow across the frame with

 

14 Mondrian, op. cit., p. 10.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

158 Expanded Cinema

 

uncanny impact. It is this stunning emotional force that lifts the films
far beyond any realm of "purity" into the most evocative and
metaphysical dimensions of sight and sound. The films are literally
superempirical— that is, actual experiences of a transcendental
nature. They create for the viewer a state of nonordinary reality
similar, in concept at least, to those experiences described by the
anthropologist Carlos Castaneda in his experiments with organic
hallucinogens.15

 

E. H. Gombrich: "The experience of color stimulates deeper levels
of the mind. This is demonstrated by experiments with mescaline,
under the influence of which the precise outlines of objects become
uncertain and ready to intermingle freely with little regard to formal
appearances. On the other hand color becomes greatly enhanced,
tends to detach itself from the solid objects and assumes an
independent existence of its own."
Belson's work might be described as kinetic painting were it not for
the incredible fact that the images exist in front of his camera, often
in real time, and thus are not animations. Live photography of actual
material is accomplished on a special optical bench in Belson's
studio in San Francisco's North Beach. It is essentially a plywood
frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed
motors, and variable intensity lights. In comparison to Trumbull's slit-
scan machine or the Whitneys' mechanical analogue computer it's
an amazingly simple device. Belson does not divulge his methods,
not out of some jealous concern for trade secrets— the techniques
are known to many specialists in optics— but more as a magician
maintaining the illusion of his magic. He has destroyed hundreds of
feet of otherwise good film because he felt the technique was too
evident. It is Belson's ultrasensitive interpretation of this technology
that creates the art.

 

The same can be said for the sounds as well as the images.
Belson synthesizes his own sound, mostly electronic, on home
equipment. His images are so overwhelming that often the sound,
itself a creation of chilling beauty, is neglected in critical appraisals.
The sound often is so integral to the imagery that, as Belson says:
"You don't know if you're seeing it or hearing it."

 

15 Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan— A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Los
Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1968).

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 159

 

He regards the films not as exterior entities, but literally as
extensions of his own consciousness. "I first have to see the images
somewhere," he says, "within or without or somewhere. I mean I
don't make them up. My whole aesthetic rests on discovering what's
there and trying to discover what it all means in terms of relating to
my own experience in the world of objective reality. I can't just
dismiss these films as audio-visual exercises. They obviously mean
something, and in a sense everything I've learned in life has been
through my efforts to find out what these things mean."

 

He has been a serious student of Buddhism for many years and
has committed himself to a rigorous Yoga discipline. He began
experimenting with peyote and other hallucinogens more than fifteen
years ago. Recently his interests have developed equally in the
directions of inner space (Mahayana Buddhism) and outer space
(interstellar and galactic astrophysics). Thus by bringing together
Eastern theology, Western science, and consciousness-expanding
drug experiences, Belson predates the front ranks of avant-garde art
today in which the three elements converge. Like the ancient
alchemists he is a true visionary, but one whose visions are
manifested in concrete reality, however nonordinary it might be.

 

Teilhard de Chardin has employed the term ultra-hominization to
indicate the probable future stage of evolution in which man will have
so far transcended himself that he will require some new appellation.
Taking Chardin's vision as a point of departure, Louis Pauwels has
surmised: "No doubt there are already among us the products of this
mutation, or at least men who have already taken some steps along
the road which we shall all be traveling one day.''16 It requires only a
shift in perspective to realize that Belson is taking those steps.

 

Allures: From Matter to Spirit

 

Originally a widely-exhibited painter, Belson turned to filmmaking in
1947 with crude animations drawn on cards, which he subsequently
destroyed. He returned to painting for four years and in 1952
resumed film work with a series that blended cinema and painting
through the use of animated scrolls. The four films produced in the
period 1952-53 were Mambo, Caravan, Mandala, and Bop Scotch.
From 1957-59 he worked with Henry Jacobs as visual director of

 

16Pauwels, Bergier, op. cit., p. 59.

 

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the Vortex Concerts at Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco.
Simultaneously he produced three more animated films, Flight
(1958), Raga (1959), and Seance (1959). Allures, completed in
1961, found Belson moving away from single-frame animation
toward continuous real-time photography. It is the earliest of his
works that he still considers relevant enough to discuss.

 

He describes Allures as a "mathematically precise" film on the
theme of cosmogenesis— Teilhard de Chardin's term intended to
replace cosmology and to indicate that the universe is not a static
phenomenon but a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of
existence and organization. However, Belson adds: "It relates more
to human physical perceptions than my other films. It's a trip
backwards along the senses into the interior of the being. It fixes
your gaze, physically holds your attention."

 

Allures begins with an ethereal pealing of bells. A centrifugal
starburst of pink, yellow, and blue sparks whirls out of a black void.
Its points collect into clusters and fade. Bells become weird chimes;
we sink into a bottomless orange and black vortex. An intricate pink
mandala of interconnected web patterns spins swiftly into the
distance. A caterpillar-like coil looms ominously out of infinity. We
hear a tweetering electronic warble, a collection of threatening piano
notes. Pink and yellow sparks wiggle vertically up the frame. Distant
snakelike coils appear and fade. A tiny sun surrounded by a huge
orange halo disintegrates. There are flying, comet-like petal shapes.

 

Oscilloscope streak-dots bounce across the frame with a twittering,
chattering metallic noise. They form complex triangular and
tetrahedral grid patterns of red, yellow, and blue. Out of this evolves
an amorphous yellow-white pulsating globe of fire without definite
shape. It vanishes and a blue, neon-bright baton rotates slowly into
infinity.

 

"I think of Allures," said Belson, "as a combination of molecular
structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and
subjective phenomena— all happening simultaneously. The
beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally
nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.
Allures was the first film to really open up spatially. Oskar Fischinger

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 161

 

Jordan Belson: Allures. 1961.16mm.
Color. 9 min. "A combination of
molecular structures and astronomical
events mixed with subconscious
phenomena... a trip backward
along the senses from matter to
spirit."

 

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162 Expanded Cinema

 

had been experimenting with spatial dimensions butAllures seemed
to be outer space rather than earth space. Of course you see the
finished film, carefully calculated to give you a specific impression. In
fact it took a year and a half to make, pieced together in thousands
of different ways, and the final product is only five minutes long.
Allures actually developed out of images I was working with in the
Vortex Concerts. Up until that time my films had been pretty much
rapid-fire. They were animated and there was no real pacing— just
one sustained frenetic pace. After working with some very
sophisticated equipment at Vortex I learned the effectiveness of
something as simple as fading in and out very slowly. But it was all
still very impersonal. There's nothing really personal in the images of

 

Allures."

 

After the glowing blue baton vanishes the screen is black and
silent. Almost imperceptibly a cluster of blue dots breaks from the
bottom into magnetic force fields that become a complex grid pattern
of geometrical shapes superposed on one another until the frame is
filled with dynamic energy and mathematical motion. A screeching
electronic howl accentuates the tension as galaxies of force fields
collide, permutate, and transmute spectacularly. Some squadrons
rush toward the camera as others speed away. Some move
diagonally, others horizontally or vertically. It's all strongly reminiscent
of 2001— except that it was made seven years earlier.
Elsewhere in the film rumbling thunder is heard as flying sparks
collect into revolving atomic structures, from whose nuclei emanate
shimmering tentacles of tweetering multicolored light. At the end we
hear ethereal harp music as a pulsating sun, fitfully spewing out
bright particles, reveals within itself another glimmering galaxy.

 

Re-Entry: Blast-off and Bardo

 

Re-Entry is considered by many to be Belson's masterwork.
Completed in 1964 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, it is
simultaneously a film on the theme of mystic reincarnation and
actual spacecraft reentry into the earth's atmosphere. Also, as
Belson says, "It was my reentry into filmmaking because I'd given up
completely after Allures. Mostly for financial reasons. But also out of
general dismay at the experimental film scene. There was no
audience, no distribution, there was just no future in it at that time."

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 163

 

Re-Entry is chiefly informed by two specific sources: John Glenn's
first space trip, and the philosophical concept of theBardo, as set
forth in the ancient Bardo Thodol or so-called Tibetan Book of the
Dead, a fundamental work of Mahayana Buddhism. According to
Jung, Bardo existence is rather like a state of limbo, symbolically
described as an intermediate state of forty-nine days between death
and rebirth. The Bardo is divided into three states: the first, called
Chikhai Bardo, describes the psychic happenings at the moment of
death; the second, or Chonyid Bardo, deals with the dream-state
that supervenes immediately after death, and with what are called
karmic illusions; the third part, or Sidpa Bardo, concerns the onset of
the birth instinct and of prenatal events.17

 

With imagery of the highest eloquence, Belson aligns the three
stages of the Bardo with the three stages of space flight: leaving the
earth's atmosphere (death), moving through deep space (karmic
illusions), and reentry into the earth's atmosphere (rebirth).

 

The film, says Belson, "shows a little more than human beings are
supposed to see." It begins with a rumbling thunderous drone (blastoff,
perhaps). In a black void we see centripetal, or imploding, blue-
pink gaseous forms barely visible as they rush inward and vanish.
The sound fades, as though we have left acoustical space. After a
moment of silence, the next sound is wholly unearthly: a twittering
electrical pitch as vague clouds of red and yellow gases shift across
the screen amorphously. Suddenly with a spiraling high-pitched
whine we see a gigantic solar prominence (one of two stock-footage,
live-action sequences) lashing out into space, changing from blue to
purple to white to red. Now blinding white flashes, as though we're
passing the sun, and suddenly we are into a shower of descending
white sparks that become squadrons of geometrical modules moving
up and out from the bottom of the frame, warping and shifting to
each side of center as they near the top.

 

GENE: Certain of your images appear in every film, like the
geometrical, perspectival interference patterns. They're quite
effective. Do you conceive them through some sort of
mathematical concept?

 

17 W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Oxford University Press,
1960).

 

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164 Expanded Cinema

 

6 min. "The film does manage to transport
whoever is looking at it out of the boundaries
of the self."

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 165

 

Jordan Belson: Re-Entry. “… the next
thing you know you're in heaven. You're
surprised to be there. On the other hand,
it's happening … "

 

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166 Expanded Cinema

 

JORDAN: Those images in particular are derived from the nature of
the device itself. But the images later in the film— the more
nebulous ones, of more magnitude— they're more a question of
personal vision. Discerning them, seeking them out, presents all
sorts of possibilities by being receptive to them when I find them
beneath my camera.

 

GENE: Are there other stock-footage sequences?

 

JORDAN: Yes. You wouldn't recognize it, but there's a shot of the
earth rolling by, as seen from a camera in a rocket. I excerpted a
part of that film and doubled it, so it was mirrored Rorschach-like.
That's for the reentry to earth. The film leans heavily on such
material. As a matter of fact, on the sound track there's actually
John Glenn's radio conversation from his spacecraft to earth. He's
saying something like ". . . I can see a light..." He was referring to
Perth, Australia, as he passed over. Then it shoots past the earth
and the sun and goes off into a rather ambiguous area in which
you have to cross over barriers of time and space, but also mental,
psychological barriers as well. It's a kind of breakdown of the
personality in a way. It sort of boils out and the next thing you know
you're in heaven. You're surprised to be there. On the other hand
it's happening you know.

 

The "boiling out" sequence is among the most dramatic in all of
Belson's films. Suddenly we hear a thunderous rumble that increases
in intensity until the bottom of the frame begins to turn pale
manganese blue and cobalt violet, a gaseous boiling cloud that
surges up over the frame, turning alizarin crimson. We descend
through it, as though it is being blasted upward by some explosive
force far below. Image and sound increase to unimaginable intensity
as though we're hurtling through sheets of space fire in a cosmic
heat belt. The spacecraft is out of our solar system and into another
dimension. Death has occurred; we move into the second stage of
the Bardo.

 

At a corresponding point in the Bardo of Karmic Illusions the
Sanskrit text reads: "The wisdom of the Dharma-Dhatu, blue in color,
shining transparent, glorious, dazzling, from the heart of Vairochana
as the Father-Mother, will shoot forth and strike against thee with a
light so radiant that thou wilt scarcely be able to look at it."18

 

18 Ibid., p. 106.

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 167

 

This of course could be interpreted as a supernova whose
maximum intrinsic luminosity reaches one-hundred million times that
of our sun. The image in Belson's film is somewhat like slow-motion
movies of atomic blasts in Nevada with the desert floor swept across
by a tremendous shock wave. At another point it appears as a sky of
mackerel clouds suddenly set aflame and blown asunder by some
interstellar force. Shimmering iceberg shapes of every hue in the
spectrum dance like galactic stalactites against a sizzling frying
sound. This becomes a dizzying geometrical corridor or eerie lights
almost exactly like the slit-scan corridor of 2001— except that it was
made four years earlier.

 

Carl Jung describes the final stage of theBardo: "The illuminative
lights grow ever fainter and more multifarious, the visions more and
more terrifying. This descent illustrates the estrangement of
consciousness from the liberating truth as it approaches nearer and
nearer to physical rebirth.''19

 

The images assume majestic dimensions. Seemingly millions of
minute particles suggesting mesons, cosmic rays that survive in the
atmosphere for only a millionth of a second, cascade in sizzling
firestorms down from the top and up from the bottom in shards of
viridian, ultramarine red, Thalo blue. There's a sense of unthinkable
enormity. Finally we see a white sun surrounded by a pulsating red
halo, which is then obscured by vapors. "The film does manage to
transport whoever is looking at it," said Belson, "out of the
boundaries of the self. At that very moment is when the foundation
slips out from under us and very rudely we're brought back to earth.
It's all very much like the process of spacecraft reentry. You're out
there, free, totally free from the limitations of earthly distance, and
suddenly you have to come back and it's a very painful thing."

 

Phenomena: From Humans to Gods

 

Phenomena (see color plates), completed in 1965, moved Belson
closer to the totally personal metaphysical experience that culminated
two years later in Samadhi. Also Phenomena was the first film in
which he abandoned allegories with space flight or astronomic sub

 

19 Ibid., p. xxxvi.

 

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168 Expanded Cinema

 

jects for a more Buddhistic exploration of psychic energies. It was
primarily inspired by Buddha's statements in the Diamond Sutra and
the Heart Sutra.

 

The film begins with electronically-distorted rock music as
curvilinear dish shapes of bright cadmium red, crimson, and
cerulean blue expand frenetically. A glowing red neon coil pulsates to
the music. Next we see— unique in Belson's work— a recognizable
though distorted figure of a man, then a woman, images shot from
television through warped glass filters. They are obscured by a
hailstorm of popping confetti-like flashes of red, white, and blue on a
black field. The music fades into tumultuous cheering throngs as a
fiery red starburst erupts in a sky of cobalt blue, its rings expanding
into individual thorny clusters.

 

Belson thinks of this sequence as "an extremely capsulized history
of creation on earth, including all the elements and man. It's the
human sociological-racial experience on one level, and it's a kind of
biological experience in the sense that it's physical. It's seen with the
blinders of humanity, you know, just being a human, grunting on the
face of the earth, exercising and agonizing. There's even a touch of
the Crucifixion in there— a brief suggestion of a crown of thorns, a
red ring of centers, each emitting a kind of thorny light cluster. The
man and the woman are Adam and Eve if they're anyone. I see them
as rather comic at that point. At the end of course it's pure
consciousness and they're like gods. The end of the film is the
opposite of the beginning: it's still life on earth but not seen from
within, as sangsara, but as if you were approaching it from outside of
consciousness so to speak. From cosmic consciousness. As though
you were approaching it as a god. You see the same things but with
completely different meaning."

 

In Buddhism the phenomenal universe of physical matter is known
as sangsara. Its antithesis is nirvana or that which is beyond
phenomena. Also within sangsara exists maya, Sanskrit for a
magical or illusory show with direct reference to the phenomenon of
nature. Thus in the Diamond Sutra Buddha equates sangsara with
nirvana since both contain "magical" elements and asserts that both
are illusory.20 This is the substance of Belson’s film.

 

20 Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra, The Heart Sutra
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1958).

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 169

 

Suddenly and quite incongruously we hear German Lieder
(Belson: "The epitome of the ego personality"). A gorgeous organ-
pipe lumia display dances across the frame, a shifting alignment of
fluted columns of phosphorescent colors similar to the work of
Thomas Wilfred and more recent lumia artists such as Julio le Parc.
Though Belson calls it a "gaudy juke-box lighting effect," it is far
more beautiful than its predecessors: vertical shafts of white light
through which move horizontal sheets of emerald, Prussian blue,
rose madder, pale citron.

 

The pillars of color melt with a crackling buzz and slowly liquid
blobs of pigment solidify into one of the most spectacular images of
Belson's films: a mosaic field of hundreds of hard-edge, bullet-
shaped modules in a serial grid. Each tiny unit constantly transforms
its shape and color— from violet to Mars red to French ultramarine
blue to mint green and zinc yellow. The staccato buzz flawlessly
underscores the geometry, as though the modules are generating
the sound as they converge and transform.

 

Suddenly the frame is shattered with a roar and a fiery light in a
heaven of boiling multihued gases: a grim, sinister eruption that
suggests, according to Belson, "depersonalization, the shattering of
the ego-bound consciousness, perhaps through death, perhaps
through evolution or rebirth." This celestial storm of manganese blue
and zinc yellow leads into a state of karmic illusions with glacial,
floating, aurora borealis lights of red and yellow-whites, rainbow
liquid cascades of exquisite sheerness.

 

Various states of matter rise above, iceberg-like, sink and float
away. This is followed by an intense white-light sequence with an
ethereal mother-of-pearl quality, representing a state of total integration
with the universe, of blinding super-consciousness. It culminates
in an enormous roaring sphere of flaming gases. In the final sequence,
against a descending drone, the void is shattered by a
central light that throws out sweeping circular rainbows of liquid color
moving majestically clockwise, collecting together, and lashing out
again in the opposite direction until the ultimate fade-out.

 

Samadhi: Documentary of a Human Soul

 

For two years, from 1966 through 1967, assisted by a
Guggenheim Fellowship, Belson subjected himself to a rigorously
ascetic Yoga discipline. He severed emotional and family ties, re

 

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Jordan Belson: Samadhi. 1967.16mm. Color. 6 min.
"When I finally saw how intense Samadhi is, I knew I had achieved
the real substance of what I was trying to depict. Natural forces
have that intensity: not dreamy but hard, ferocious."

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 171

 

duced physical excitements and stimulations, reversed his sensory
process to focus exclusively on his inner consciousness and
physical resources. The result of this Olympian effort was Samadhi
(see color plates), certainly among the most powerful and haunting
states of nonordinary reality ever captured on film "It's a
documentary of the human soul," he says. "The experiences which
led up to the production of this film, and the experiences of making it,
totally convinced me that the soul is an actual physical entity, not a
vague abstraction or symbol. I was very pleased when I finally saw
how concentrated, how intense, Samadhi is because I knew I had
achieved the real substance of what I was trying to depict. Natural
forces have that intensity: not dreamy but hard, ferocious. After it
was finished I felt I should have died. I was rather amazed when I
didn't."

 

In Mahayana Buddhism death is considered a liberating
experience that reunites the pure spirit of the mind with its natural or
primal condition. An incarnate mind, united to a human body, is said
to be in an unnatural state because the driving forces of the five
senses continually distract it in a process of forming thoughts. It is
considered close to natural only during the state of Samadhi,
Sanskrit for, "that state of consciousness in which the individual soul
merges with the universal soul." This state is sought— but rarely
achieved— through dhyana, the deepest meditation. In dhyana there
can be no "idea" of meditation, for the idea, by its very existence,
defeats the experience. The various stages ofdhyana are denoted
by the appearance of lights representing certain levels of wisdom
until the final "Clear Light" is perceived. In this quasi-primordial state
of supramundane all-consciousness, the physical world of sangsara
and the spiritual world of nirvana become one.

 

Electroencephalograms of Hindu Yogis in states of Samadhic
ecstasy, or what in psychology is known as manic dedifferentiation,
show curves that do not correspond to any cerebral activities known
to science, either in wakefulness or sleep. Yogis claim that during
Samadhi they are able to grow as large as the Milky Way or as small
as the smallest conceivable particle. Carlos Castaneda discusses
similar experiences in his report of apprenticeship to a Yaqui Indian
sorcerer. Such fantastic assumptions are not to be taken literally so
much as conceptually, as experiences of nonordinary psychological
realities, which are nonetheless real for him who experiences them.

 

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172 Expanded Cinema

 

Perhaps with these concepts in mind we can approach Belson's
sublime vision on a level more suited to it. We might remember also
that practically everyone reading this book has in his possession an
instrument that transforms energy within matter: the transistor. Belson
seeks no more and no less than this. Samadhi is a record of two
years of his search.

 

Samadhi was a radical departure from Belson's previous work in
many ways. First, rather than ebbing and flowing in paced rhythms, it
is one sustained cyclone of dynamic form and color whose fierce
tempo never subsides. Second, in addition to the usual electronic
sound, Belson's inhaling and exhaling is heard through the film to
represent years of Yoga breathing discipline. And finally, whereas the
earlier works moved from exterior to interior reality, Samadhi is
continually centered around flaming spheres that evolve out of
nothing and elude specific identification.

 

The various colors and intensities of these solar spheres

 

correspond directly to descriptions in the Tibetan Book of the Dead

 

of lights representing the elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. They

 

have two additional meanings, however: the kundalini moving

 

upward through the chakras; and the inhalation-exhalation of the life

 

force, prana. For those unfamiliar with Yoga concepts, the chakras

 

are physical nerve centers located within the body along the spinal

 

column at five or six points: one in the sexual region, one in the

 

region of the navel, the heart, the throat, the eyes, the middle of the

 

head, the top of the head. Clairvoyants supposedly can see them.

 

According to Yoga theory the kundalini— the vital life force that

 

animates the body— resides in a concentrated form at the base of

 

the spine in the general region of the sexual organs. Through

 

physical disciplines and ethical, moral strength one raises that center

 

of life force from the lower spine progressively, in stages, toward the

 

brain.

 

Thus one implication of the elusive shifting centers inSamadhi is a

 

trip through the chakras, from the lowest to the highest. There is also

 

the analogy with the breathing structure. When we hear Belson

 

inhale, the spheres glow brighter to indicate thatprana, the life force

 

in the air we breathe, is being introduced into the bloodstream and

 

therefore into the kundalini. The deep, spatial, dark areas of the film

 

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indicate not only the stages between chakras but also exhalations
when there is relatively less prana.

 

As it begins, a stormy field of turbulent gases collects around a
central core. The serrated vapors melt into a small central "jewel" of
curling pink and red-orange flames that finally fades into black
silence. The vacuum created by this pause reverberates in the ears
until, slowly, a deep blue filamented sphere evolves, turning with
purposive elegance, glowing into cadmium orange, surrounded by a
whirling halo. It becomes a blue sphere in a red universe, spewing
off white-hot rings of light.

 

Next comes a series of solar or planetoid visions: a scintillating
yellow star with six shimmering fingers; a blue-purple planet with a
fiery red halo; a small central globe dwarfed by an immense corona;
a dim yellow-ochre sun emanating flames that revolve like
chromospheres in a plasma storm; various stellar orbs turning with
implacable grace against wavering sonorous drones. Suddenly
there's a burst of white light of blinding intensity: a murky sea of
deep blue gas is in huge movement; waves of unbearably gorgeous
mist sweep across the void. It is obvious that contact has been made
with some vast new reality.

 

Cinema to Belson is a matrix wherein he is able to relate external
experience to internal experience. He feels that it culminated in
Samadhi. "I reached the point that what I was able to produce
externally, with the equipment, was what I was seeing internally. I
could close my eyes and see these images within my own being,
and I could look out at the sky and see the same thing happening
there too. And most of the time I'd see them when I looked through
the viewfinder of my camera mounted on the optical bench. I've
always considered image-producing equipment as extensions of the
mind. The mind has produced these images and has made the
equipment to produce them physically. In a way it's a projection of
what's going on inside, phenomena thrown out by the
consciousness, which we are then able to look at. In a sense I'm
doing something similar to the clairvoyant Ted Serios who can
project his thoughts onto Polaroid film. Only I have to filter my
consciousness through an enormous background of art and
filmmaking. But we're doing the same thing. Samadhi breaks new
territory in a way. It's as though I've come back from there with my
camera in hand— I've been able to film it.

 

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174 Expanded Cinema

 

GENE: Do you feel your drug experiences have been beneficial to
your work?

 

JORDAN: Absolutely. Early in life I experimented with peyote, LSD,
and so on. But in many ways my films are ahead of my own
experience. In fact Samadhi is the only one in which I actually
caught up with the film and ran alongside of it for just a moment.
The film is way ahead of anything I've experienced on a continuing
basis. And the same has been true of the drug experiences. They
somehow set the stage for the insights. I had peyote fifteen years
ago but I didn't have any cosmic or Samadhic experiences. That
remained for something to happen through development on
different levels of consciousness. The new art and other forms of
expression reveal the influence of mind-expansion. And finally we
reach the point where there virtually is no separation between
science, observation, and philosophy. The new artist works
essentially in the same way as the scientist. In many cases it's
identical with scientific exploration. But at other times the artist is
able to focus more in the area of consciousness and subjective
phenomena, but with the same kind of scientific zeal, the same
objectivity, as scientists. Cosmic consciousness is not limited to
scientists. In fact scientists are sometimes the last to know. They
can look through their telescopes and see it out there, but still be
very limited individuals."

 

Momentum: The Sun as an Atom

 

If one were to isolate a single quality that distinguishes Belson's
films from other "space" movies, it would be that his work is always
heliocentric whereas most others, even 2001, are geocentric. The
archetypal nature of the sun is such that Belson's obsession with it
has, at times, tended toward a certain mysticism that was, no doubt,
unavoidable. That he would someday make a movie exclusively
about the sun was inevitable; that it would be his least mystical work
came as something of a surprise.

 

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The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson 175

 

Jordan Belson: Momentum. 1969.
16mm. Color. 6 min. "The paradoxical
realm in which subatomic phenomena
and the cosmologically vast are
identical."

 

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176 Expanded Cinema

 

"I was wondering what the subject of my next film would be after
Samadhi," he said. "My whole world had collapsed. All the routines
I'd created in order to develop the state of consciousness to produce
that film just fell apart. So I had to keep working just to maintain the
momentum from Samadhi. I had no pre-conceived idea what the
new material was about, but I was calling it Momentum. Eventually I
discovered it was about the sun. I ran right to the library; the more I
read the more I realized this was exactly what Momentum was
about. All the material was similar if not identical to solar phenomena
like corona phenomena, photosphere phenomena, chromosphere
phenomena, sun spots, plasma storms— I was even getting into
some interesting speculation about what goes oninside the sun. And
I realized that the film doesn't stop at the sun, it goes to the center of
the sun and into the atom. So that was the film, about the sun as an
atom. The end shows the paradoxical realm in which subatomic
phenomena and the cosmologically vast are identical. Through the
birth of a new star is where it happens."

 

Momentum (see color plates) was completed in May 1969, after
eighteen months of painstaking study and labor. In one sense it's a
refinement of the whole vocabulary he's developed through the
years, distilled to their essence. But there are new effects inspired by
this particular subject. Momentum is a calm, objective experience of
concrete imagery that manages to suggest abstract concepts without
becoming particularly symbolic.

 

It begins with stock footage of a Saturn rocket whose after-burners
blaze in rainbow fury. We hear echoing ethereal music and slow
cyclic drones. Next we see a solar image in mauves and iridescent
ruby, huge prominences flaring in slow motion. A series of graceful
lap-dissolves brings us closer to the sphere as it revolves with a
steady and ponderous dignity. In spite of its furious subject,
Momentum is Belson's most serene and gentle film since Allures.
This treatment of the sun as an almost dreamlike hallucinatory
experience is both surprising and curiously realistic— to the extent
that one can even speak of "realism" in connection with solar
images.

 

There's a visceral, physical quality to the images as we draw near
to the surface and, with a soul-shaking roar, descend slowly into
blackness: apparently the suggestion of a sun spot. Flaming napalm-
like clouds of gas surge ominously into the void, which suddenly is
shattered with an opalescent burst of light. We move through various

 

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levels of temperature and matter. Belson's now-familiar techniques
seem to possess a pristine clarity and precision not previously so
distinct. Swooping cascades of flame seem especially delicate;
fantastic towering shards of luminescent color reach deeper levels of
the mind; the translucent realms of kinaesthesia leave one
speechless.

 

Moving deeper into the mass, images become more uniform with a
textural quality like a shifting sea of silver silt. Millions of tiny flashes
erupt over a field of deep blue vapors. Quick subtle movements and
sudden ruptures in the fabric of color seem suppressed by some
tremendous force. Indefinite shapes and countless particles swim in
a frantic sea of color.

 

"Then the film goes into fusion," said Belson. "A state of atomic
interaction more intense than fission. This is supposed to take place
on the sun, fusion." A blinding red fireball breaks into a multi-pointed
star of imploding light/energy, flashing brighter and brighter,
mounting in intensity. An image similar to James Whitney's Lapis— a
collecting of millions of tiny particles around a central fiery core—
builds up to the moment of crescendo, with all the colors of the
universe melting into one supremely beautiful explosion, and
suddenly we're deep in interstellar space, watching a distant flash as
a new sun is born.

 

"The whole secret of life must somehow exist in the solar image,"
Belson remarked. "Momentum is a kind of revelation regarding the
sun as the source of life. Not only in our solar system, but wherever
there's a sun it's the source of life in that part of the universe. We
come from it and return to it. Though we think of the sun as a
gigantic thing, I think probably an atom itself is a small sun— in fact
our sun is probably an atom in a larger structure. It's somehow tied
up with the essence of being. If you were to think of a single form
that would be the primary structure of the universe it would just have
to be the solar sphere. I mean there's so much evidence around us
to that effect."

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

178

 

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ARTSCILAB 2001

 

PART FOUR:
CYBERNETIC CINEMA AND COMPUTER FILMS

 

"The computer is the LSD of the business world. It absolutely guarantees the
elimination of all the business it is now being brought to serve."

 

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Technosphere: Man/Machine Symbiosis

 

If one were to propose a Bill of Rights for the year 2000 it would
defend human liberty, not civil liberty. Guaranteed rights would
include health, truth, reality, sexual fulfillment, study, travel, peace,
intimacy, leisure, the right to be unique. Man is not "civilized" until he
is whole. He is not whole until he's assured these rights. But I would
add another: the right of every man to be protected from the
consequences of his own ignorance. The computer provides this
protection.

 

The computer does not make man obsolete. It makes him fail-safe.
The computer does not replace man. It liberates him from
specialization. The transition from a culture that considers leisure a
"problem" to a culture that demands leisure as a prerequisite of
civilized behavior is a metamorphosis of the first magnitude. And it
has begun. The computer is the arbiter of radical evolution: it
changes the meaning of life. It makes us children. We must learn
how to live all over again.

 

"Recently, as in his natural symbiotic relations with plants and
animals, man's relation to cybernetic systems has been subtly
changing toward a more closely-woven interdependency resembling
his other ecological ties. This trend often is depicted as 'intelligent'
machines dominating man; but the possibility is more clearly that of
organic partnership… ''1

 

In laboratories all over the world, biochemists are drawing ever
closer to the secrets of the genetic code. Younger readers of this
book may within their lifetimes, rub shoulders with pre-programmed
humans. I do not say "synthetic" or "artificial." Fuller: "We speak
erroneously of 'artificial' materials, 'synthetics' and so on. The basis
for this erroneous terminology is the notion that nature has certain
things which we call natural, and everything else is 'manmade,' ergo
artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that nature wrote all the
rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules;
he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is to find out what

 

1 John McHale, “New Symbiosis,” Architectural Design (February, 1967), p. 89.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Technosphere: Man/Machine Symbiosis 181

 

nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered
are inherently natural."2

 

John McHale: "We refuse to accept the reality of potentially
limitless wealth inherent in our new symbiotic relation to automated
technological processes. Scientific and technical development
destroys all previous intrinsic value in physical resources or
properties. From this point on, broadly speaking, all materials are
inter-convertible. The only unique resource-input is human knowledge—
the organized information which programs machine performance.
The products are non-unique and expendable, as are the
machines and materials. The only part of the whole process which is
non-expendable and uniquely irreplaceable is man. Those social
orientations which have had great survival value in the past now
endanger survival in the present and cripple our approach to the
future."3

 

In 1963 two Soviet scientists amplified the bio-electrical muscle
currents of a human body to operate exoskeletal servomechanisms
attached to the limbs.4 For the first time, organic partnership was
achieved to the direct physical advantage of man. The director of
cardiovascular surgery at Maimonides Hospital asserted, also in
1963: "Surgery is essentially an engineering discipline… the
integration of electronic circuits into the human body as functioning
and permanent parts… is going to become very important within the
next ten years."5 Since that remark we have witnessed a steady
increase in the number of cyborgs walking among us. Scientists now
speak of "moral spectrums for machines" based on the extent to
which the machine "...helps or hinders human beings to realize their
potentialities and thus to lead satisfactory lives."6

 

The computer amplifies man's intelligence in about the same ratio
that the telescope extends his vision. The man/computer symbiosis

 

2 Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 75, 76.
3McHale, "People Future," Architectural Design (February, 1967), p. 94.
4 A. E. Kobvinsky and V. S. Gurfinkel,Time (December, 1963).
5A. Kantrowitz, Electronic Physiologic Aids (New York: Maimonides Hospital, 1963).
6 M. W. Thring, "The Place of the Technologist in Modern Society,"Journal of the RSA
(London, April, 1966).

 

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182 Expanded Cinema

 

is developed to the point where the machine instructs its user and
indicates possibilities for closer interaction. One needn't read the
manual but may consult the machine directly with the order, "I want
to do something, instruct me." It is not even necessary to be in the
presence of the computer to do this. One can carry out one's work
thousands of miles away, linked to the computer through remote
viewing and operating consoles.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Human Bio-Computer
and His Electronic Brainchild

 

The verb "to compute" in general usage means to calculate. A
computer, then, is any system capable of accepting data, applying
prescribed processes to them, and supplying results of these
processes. The first computer, used thousands of years ago, was
the abacus.

 

There are two types of computer systems: those that measure and
those that count. A measuring machine is called an analogue
computer because it establishes analogous connections between
the measured quantities and the numerical quantities supposed to
represent them. These measured quantities may be physical
distances, volumes, or amounts of energy. Thermostats, rheostats,
speedometers, and slide rules are examples of simple analogue
computers.

 

A counting machine is called a digital computer because it consists
entirely of two-way switches that perform direct, not analogous,
functions. These switches operate with quantities expressed directly
as digits or discrete units of a numerical system known as thebinary
system.7 This system has 2 as its base. (The base of the decimal
system is 10, the base of the octal system is 8, the base of the
hexadecimal system is 16, and so on.) The binary code used in
digital computers is expressed in terms of one and zero (1-0),
representing on or off, yes or no. In electronic terms its equivalent is
voltage or no voltage. Voltages are relayed through a sequence of
binary switches in which the opening of a later switch depends on
the action of precise combinations of earlier switches leading to it.
The term binary digit usually is abbreviated as bit, which is used also
as a unit of measurement of information. A computer is said to have
a "million-bit capacity," or a laser hologram is described as requiring
109 bits of information to create a three-dimensional image.

 

The largest high-velocity digital computers have a storage capacity
from four thousand to four million bits consisting of twelve to forty

 

7 Wiener, op. cit., pp. 88-90.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

184 Expanded Cinema

 

eight digits each. The computer adds together two forty-eight digit
numbers simultaneously, whereas a man must add each pair of
digits successively. The units in which this information is stored are
called ferrite memory cores. As the basic component of the
electronic brain, the ferrite memory core is equivalent to the neuron,
the fundamental element of the human brain, which is also a digital
computer. The point at which a nerve impulse passes from one
neuron to another is called a synapse, which measures about 0.5
micron in diameter. Through microelectronic techniques of
Discretionary Wiring and Large Scale Integration (LSI), circuit
elements of five microns are now possible. That is, the size of the
computer memory core is approaching the size of the neuron. A
complete computer function with an eight-hundred-bit memory has
been constructed only nineteen millimeters squared.8

 

The time required to insert or retrieve one bit of information is
known as memory cycle time. Whereas neurons take approximately
ten milliseconds (10-2 second) to transmit information from one to
another, a binary element of a ferrite memory core can be reset in
one hundred nanoseconds, or one hundred billionths of a second
(10-7 second). This means that computers are about one-hundredthousand
times faster than the human brain. This is largely offset,
however, by the fact that computer processing is serial whereas the
brain performs parallel processing. Although the brain conducts
milli ons of operations simultaneously, most digital computers conduct
only one computation at any one instant in time.9 Brain
elements are much more richly connected than the elements in a
computer. Whereas an element in a computer rarely receives
simultaneous inputs from two other units, a brain cell may be
simultaneously influenced by several hundred other nerve cells.10
Moreover, while the brain must sort out and select information from
the nonfocused total field of the outside world, data input to a
computer is carefully pre-processed.

 

8 A. T. Lawton and G. E. Abrook, "Large Scale Integration,"Science Journal (London,
August, 1968).
9N. S. Sutherland, "Machines Like Men,"Science Journal (London, October, 1968).
10 Ibid.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Hardware and Software

 

It is often said that computers are "extraordinarily fast and
extraordinarily accurate, but they also are exceedingly stupid and
therefore have to be told everything." This process of telling the
computer everything is called computer programming. The hardware
of the human bio-computer is the physical cerebral cortex, its
neurons and synapses. The software of our brain is its logic or
intelligence, that which animates the physical equipment. That is to
say, hardware is technology whereas software is information. The
software of the computer is the stored set of instructions that
controls the manipulation of binary numbers. It usually is stored in
the form of punched cards or tapes, or on magnetic tape. The
process by which information is passed from the human to the
machine is called computer language. Two of the most common
computer languages are Algol derived from "Algorithmic Language,"
and Fortran, derived from "Formula Translation."

 

The basis of any program is an algorithm— a prescribed set of
rules that define the parameters, or discrete characteristics, of the
solution to a given problem. The algorithm is the solution, as
opposed to the heuristics or methods of finding a solution. In the
case of computer-generated graphic images, the problem is how to
create a desired image or succession of images. The solution
usually is in the form of polar equations with parametric controls for
straight lines, curves, and dot patterns.

 

Computers can be programmed to simulate "conceptual cameras"
and the effects of other conceptual filmmaking procedures. Under a
grant from the National Science Foundation in 1968, electrical
engineers at the University of Pennsylvania produced a forty-minute
instructional computer film using a program that described a
"conceptual camera," its focal plane and lens angle, panning and
zoom actions, fade-outs, double-exposures, etc. A program of
"scenario description language" was written which, in effect, stored
fifty years of moviemaking techniques and concepts into an IBM
360-65 computer.11

 

11 Ron Schneiderman, "Researchers Using IBM 360 to Produce Animated Films,"
Electronic News (June 17, 1968), p. 42.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

186 Expanded Cinema

 

In the last decade seventy percent of all computer business was in
the area of central processing hardware, that is, digital computers
themselves. Authorities estimate that the trend will be completely
reversed in the coming decade, with seventy percent of profits being
made in software and the necessary input-output terminals. At
present, software equals hardware in annual sales of approximately
$6.5 billion, and is expected to double by 1975.12

 

Today machines read printed forms and may even decipher
handwriting. Machines "speak" answers to questions and are voice-
actuated. Computers play chess at tournament level. In fact, one of
the first instances of a computer asking itself an original question
occurred in the case of a machine programmed to play checkers and
backgammon simultaneously. A situation developed in which it had
to make both moves in one reset cycle and thus had to choose
between the two, asking itself: "Which is more important, checkers or
backgammon?" It selected backgammon on the grounds that more
affluent persons play that game, and since the global trend is toward
more wealth per each world person, backgammon must take
priority.13

 

Machine tools in modern factories are controlled by other
machines, which themselves have to be sequenced by higher-order
machines Computer models can now be built that exhibit many of
the characteristics of human personality, including love, fear, and
anger. They can hold beliefs, develop attitudes, and interact with
other machines and human personalities. Machines are being
developed that can manipulate objects and move around
autonomously in a laboratory environment. They explore and learn,
plan strategies, and can carry out tasks that are incompletely
specified.14

 

So-called learning machines such as the analogue UCLM II from
England, and the digital Minos II developed at Stanford University,
gradually are phasing out the prototype digital computer. A learning
machine has been constructed at the National Physical Laboratory
that learns to recognize and to associate differently shapedshadows
which the same object casts in different positions.15 These new elec

 

12 Robert A. Rosenblatt, "Software: The Tail Now Wags the Dog," Los Angeles Times
Outlook (June 29, 1969), sec. 1, p. 1.
13Fuller, "Prospect for Humanity," Good News.
14 Science Journal (October, 1968).
15 Bronowski, op. cit., p. 47.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Hardware and Software 187

 

tronic brains are approaching speeds approximately one million
times faster than the fastest digital computers. It is estimated that the
next few generations of learning machines will be able to perform in
five minutes what would take a digital computer ten years. The
significance of this becomes more apparent when we realize that a
digital computer can process in twenty minutes information
equivalent to a human lifetime of seventy years at peak performance.
16

 

N. S. Sutherland: "There is a real possibility that we may one day
be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than ourselves.
There are all sorts of biological limitations on our own intellectual
capacity ranging from the limited number of computing elements we
have available in our craniums to the limited span of human life and
the slow rate at which incoming data can be accepted. There is no
reason to suppose that such stringent limitations will apply to
computers of the future... it will be much easier for computers to
bootstrap themselves on the experience of previous computers than
it is for man to benefit from the knowledge acquired by his
predecessors. Moreover, if we can design a machine more intelligent
than ourselves, then a fortiori that machine will be able to design one
more intelligent than itself.''17
The number of computers in the world doubles each year, while
computer capabilities increase by a factor of ten every two or three
years. Herman Kahn: "If these factors were to continue until the end
of the century, all current concepts about computer limitations will
have to be reconsidered. Even if the trend continues for only the
next decade or so, the improvements over current computers would
be factors of thousands to millions... By the year 2000 computers are
likely to match, simulate or surpass some of man's most 'human-like'
intellectual abilities, including perhaps some of his aesthetic and
creative capacities, in addition to having new kinds of capabilities
that human beings do not have... If it turns out that they cannot
duplicate or exceed certain characteristically human capabilities, that
will be one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth
century.''18

 

16 W. K. Taylor, "Machines That Learn," Science Journal (October, 1968).
17Sutherland, Science Journal.
18Herman Kahn, Anthony Wiener, Year 2000 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 89.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

188 Expanded Cinema

 

Dr. Marvin Minsky of M.I.T. has predicted: "As the machine improves...
we shall begin to see all the phenomena associated with
the terms 'consciousness,' 'intuition' and 'intelligence.' It is hard to
say how close we are to this threshold, but once it is crossed the
world will not be the same... it is unreasonable to think that machines
could become nearly as intelligent as we are and then stop, or to
suppose that we will always be able to compete with them in wit and
wisdom. Whether or not we could retain some sort of control of the
machines— assuming that we would want to— the nature of our
activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence
on earth of intellectually superior entities.''19 But perhaps the most
portentous implication in the evolving symbiosis of the human biocomputer
and his electronic brainchild was voiced by Dr. Irving John
Good of Trinity College, Oxford, in his prophetic statement: "The first
ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need make."20

 

19Arthur C. Clarke, "The Mind of the Machine,"Playboy (December, 1968),

 

p. 118.
20 Ibid.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Aesthetic Machine

 

As the culmination of the Constructivist tradition, the digital computer
opens vast new realms of possible aesthetic investigation. The poet
Wallace Stevens has spoken of "the exquisite environment of face."
Conventional painting and photography have explored as much of
that environment as is humanly possible. But, as with other hidden
realities, is there not more to be found there? Do we not intuit
something in the image of man that we never have been able to
express visually? It is the belief of those who work in cybernetic art
that the computer is the tool that someday will erase the division
between what we feel and what we see.

 

Aesthesic application of technology is the only means of achieving
new consciousness to match our new environment. We certainly are
not going to love computers that guide SAC missiles. We surely do
not feel warmth toward machines that analyze marketing trends. But
perhaps we can learn to understand the beauty of a machine that
produces the kind of visions we see in expanded cinema.

 

It is quite clear in what direction man's symbiotic relation to the
computer is headed: if the first computer was the abacus, the
ultimate computer will be the sublime aesthetic device: a
parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts
and emotions. A. M. Noll, a pioneer in three-dimensional computer
films at Bell Telephone Laboratories, has some interesting thoughts
on the subject: "...the artist's emotional state might conceivably be
determined by computer processing of physical and electrical signals
from the artist (for example, pulse rate and electrical activity of the
brain). Then, by changing the artist's environment through such
external stimuli as sound, color and visual patterns, the computer
would seek to optimize the aesthetic effect of all these stimuli upon
the artist according to some specified criterion... the emotional
reaction of the artist would continually change, and the computer
would react accordingly either to stabilize the artist's emotional state
or to steer it through some pre-programmed course. One is strongly
tempted to describe these ideas as a consciousness-expanding
experience in association with a psychedelic computer... current

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

190 Expanded Cinema

 

Visualizing the invisible: Six
successive stereo pairs from a film
by A. Michael Noll of Bell Telephone
Laboratories, demonstrating
the rotation, on four mutually
perpendicular axes, of a four-
dimensional hypercube projected
onto dual two-dimensional picture
planes in simulated three-dimensional
space. The viewer wears
special polarized glasses such as
those common in 3-D movies of the
early 1950's. It was an attempt to
communicate an intuitive understanding
of four-dimensional
objects, which in physics are called
hyperobjects. A computer can easily
construct, in mathematical terms,
a fourth spatial dimension perpendicular
to our three spatial
dimensions. Only a fourth digit is
required for the machine to locate
a point in four-dimensional space.
Photo: Bell Telephone Laboratories.

 

The Aesthetic Machine 191

 

technological and psychological investigations would seem to aim in
such a direction.''21

 

This chapter on computer films might be seen as an introduction to
the first tentative, crude experiments with the medium. No matter
how impressive, they are dwarfed by the knowledge of what
computers someday will be able to do. The curious nature of the
technological revolution is that, with each new step forward, so much
new territory is exposed that we seem to be moving backwards. No
one is more aware of current limitations than the artists themselves.

 

As he has done in other disciplines without a higher ordering
principle, man so far has used the computer as a modified version of
older, more traditional media. Thus we find it compared to the brush,
chisel, or pencil and used to facilitate the efficiency of conventional
methods of animating, sculpting, painting, and drawing. But the
chisel, brush, and canvas are passive media whereas the computer
is an active participant in the creative process. Robert Mallary, a
computer scientist involved in computer sculpture, has delineated six
levels of computer participation in the creative act. In the first stage
the machine presents proposals and variants for the artist's
consideration without any qualitative judgments, yet the man/machine
symbiosis is synergetic. At the second stage, the computer
becomes an indispensable component in the production of an art
that would be impossible without it, such as constructing holographic
interference patterns. In the third stage, the machine makes autonomous
decisions on alternative possibilities that ultimately govern
the outcome of the artwork. These decisions, however, are made
within parameters defined in the program. At the fourth stage the
computer makes decisions not anticipated by the artist because they
have not been defined in the program. This ability does not yet exist
for machines. At the fifth stage, in Mallary's words, the artist "is no
longer needed" and "like a child, can only get in the way." He would
still, however, be able to "pull out the plug," a capability he will not
possess when and if the computer ever reaches the sixth stage of
"pure disembodied energy."22

 

21 A. M. Noll, "The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium," IEEE Spectrum (October,
1967), p. 94.
22 Robert Mallary, "Computer Sculpture: Six Levels of Cybernetics," Artforum (May,
1969), pp. 34, 35.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

192 Expanded Cinema

 

Returning to more immediate realities, A. M. Noll has explained the
computer's active role in the creative process as it exists today:
"Most certainly the computer is an electronic device capable of
performing only those operations that it has been explicitly instructed
to perform. This usually leads to the portrayal of the computer as a
powerful tool but one incapable of any true creativity. However, if
'creativity' is restricted to mean the production of the unconventional
or the unpredicted, then the computer should instead be portrayed
as a creative medium— an active and creative collaborator with the
artist... because of the computer's great speed, freedom from error,
and vast abilities for assessment and subsequent modification of
programs, it appears to us to act unpredictably and to produce the
unexpected. In this sense the computer actively takes over some of
the artist's creative search. It suggests to him syntheses that he may
or may not accept. It possesses at least some of the external
attributes of creativity."23

 

Traditionally, artists have looked upon science as being more
important to mankind than art, whereas scientists have believed the
reverse. Thus in the confluence of art and science the art world is
understandably delighted to find itself suddenly in the company of
science. For the first time, the artist is in a position to deal directly
with fundamental scientific concepts of the twentieth century. He can
now enter the world of the scientist and examine those laws that
describe a physical reality. However, there is a tendency to regard
any computer-generated art as highly significant— even the most
simplistic line drawing, which would be meaningless if rendered by
hand. Conversely, the scientific community could not be more
pleased with its new artistic image, interpreting it as an occasion to
relax customary scientific disciplines and accept anything random as
art. A solution to the dilemma lies somewhere between the polarities
and surely will evolve through closer interaction of the two
disciplines.

 

When that occurs we will find that a new kind of art has resulted
from the interface. Just as a new language is evolving from the
binary elements of computers rather than the subject-predicate
relation of the Indo-European system, so will a new aesthetic
discipline that bears little resemblance to previous notions of art and
the creative process. Already the image of the artist has changed

 

23 Noll, "The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium," p. 91.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

The Aesthetic Machine 193

 

radically. In the new conceptual art, it is the artist's idea and not his
technical ability in manipulating media that is important. Though
much emphasis currently is placed on collaboration between artists
and technologists, the real trend is more toward one man who is
both artistically and technologically conversant. The Whitney family,
Stan VanDerBeek, Nam June Paik, and others discussed in this
book are among the first of this new breed. A. M. Noll is one of them,
and he has said: "A lot has been made of the desirability of
collaborative efforts between artists and technologists. I, however,
disagree with many of the assumptions upon which this desirability
supposedly is founded. First of all, artists in general find it extremely
difficult to verbalize the images and ideas they have in their minds.
Hence the communication of the artist's ideas to the technologist is
very poor indeed. What I do envision is a new breed of artist... a man
who is extremely competent in both technology and the arts."

 

Thus Robert Mallary speaks of an evolving "science of art...
because programming requires logic, precision and powers of
analysis as well as a thorough knowledge of the subject matter and
a clear idea of the goals of the program... technical developments in
programming and hardware will proceed hand in glove with a steady
increase in the theoretical knowledge of art, as distinct from the
intuitive and pragmatic procedures which have characterized the
creative process up to now."

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema

 

Three types of computer output hardware can be used to produce
movies: the mechanical analogue plotter, the "passive" microfilm
plotter and the "active" cathode-ray tube (CRT) display console.
Though the analogue plotter is quite useful in industrial and scientific
engineering, architectural design, systems analysis, and so forth, it is
rather obsolete in the production of aesthetically-motivated computer
films. It can and is used to make animated films but is best suited for
still drawings.

 

Through what is known as digital-to-analogue conversion, coded
signals from a computer drive an armlike servomechanism that
literally draws pen or pencil lines on flatbed or drum carriages. The
resulting flow charts, graphs, isometric renderings, or realist images
are incrementally precise but are too expensive and time-consuming
for nonscientific movie purposes. William Fetter of the Boeing
Company in Seattle has used mechanical analogue plotting systems
to make animated films for visualizing pilot and cockpit
configurations in aircraft design. Professor Charles Csuri of Ohio
State University has created "random wars" and other random and
semi-random drawings using mechanical plotters for realist images.
However, practically all computer films are made with cathode-ray
tube digital plotting output systems.

 

The cathode-ray tube, like the oscilloscope, is a special kind of
television tube. It's a vacuum tube in which a grid between cathode
and anode poles emits a narrow beam of electrons that are
accelerated at high velocity toward a phosphor-coated screen, which
fluoresces at the point where the electrons strike. The resulting
luminescent glow is called a "trace-point." An electromagnetic field
deflects the electron beam along predetermined patterns by
electronic impulses that can be broadcast, cabled, or recorded on
tape. This deflection capability follows vertical and horizontal
increments expressed as xy plotting coordinates. Modern three-inch
CRTs are capable of responding to a computer's "plot-point" and
"draw-line" commands at a rate of 100,000 per second within a field
of 16,000 possible xy coordinates— that is, approximately a million
times faster and more accurate than a human draftsman. When

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema 195

 

Above: Mechanical analogue plotter draws
pilot for computer-animated film by William
Fetter of the Boeing Company in Seattle,
Washington. Below: Animated sequence
from the film. Photo: Boeing Company.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

196 Expanded Cinema

 

interfaced with a digital computer, the CRT provides a visual display
of electronic signal information generated by the computer program.

 

The passive microfilm plotter is the most commonly used output
system for computer movies. It's a self-contained film-recording unit
in which a movie camera automatically records images generated on
the face of a three-inch CRT. The term "microfilm" is confusing to
filmmakers not conversant with industrial or scientific language. It
simply indicates conventional emulsion film in traditional 8mm.,
16mm., or 35mm. formats, used in a device not originally intended
for the production of motion pictures, but rather still pictures for
compact storage of large amounts of printed or pictorial information.
Users of microfilm plotters have found, however, that their movie-
producing capability is at least as valuable as their storage-andretrieval
capability. Most computer films are not aesthetically-
motivated. They are made by scientists, engineers, and educators to
facilitate visualization and rapid assimilation of complex analytic and
abstract concepts.

 

In standard cinematography the shutter is an integral part of the
camera's drive mechanism, mechanically interlocked with the
advance-claws that pull successive frames down to be exposed. But
cameras in microfilm plotters such as the Stromberg-Carlson 4020 or
the CalComp 840 are specially designed so that the shutter
mechanism is separate from the film pull-down. Both are operated
automatically, along with the CRT display, under computer program
control.

 

Some computer films, particularly those of John Whitney, are
made with active twenty-one-inch CRTs such as the IBM 2250
Display Console with its light pen, keyboard inputs, and functional
keys, whose use will be described in more detail later on. This
arrangement is not a self-contained filmmaking unit; rather, a specially
modified camera is set up in front of the CRT under automatic
synchronous control of a computer program. This system is called
"active" as opposed to the "passive" nature of the microfilm plotter
because the artist can feed commands to the computer through the
CRT by selecting variables with the light pen and the function
keyboard, thus "composing" the picture in time as sequences
develop (during filming, however, the light pen is not used and the

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema 197

 

Cybernetic movie studio: The IBM 2250

 

Display Console with CRT, light pen,

 

 and function keyboard. Photo: IBM.

 

CRT becomes a passive display of the algorithm). Also, until recently
the display console was the only technique that allowed the artist to
see the display as it was being recorded; recent microfilm plotters,
however, are equipped with viewing monitors.

 

Since most standard microfilm plotters were not originally intended
for the production of motion pictures, they are deficient in at least
two areas that can be avoided by using the active CRT. First, film
registration in microfilm plotters does not meet quality standards of
the motion-picture industry since frame-to-frame steadiness is not a
primary consideration in conventional microfilm usage. Second, most
microfilm plotters are not equipped to accept standard thousand-foot
core-wound rolls of 35mm, film, which of course is possible with
magazines of standard, though control-modified, cameras used to
photograph active CRTs.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

198 Expanded Cinema

 

Recently, however, computer manufacturing firms such as
Stromberg-Carlson have designed cameras and microfilm plotters
that meet all qualifications of the motion-picture industry as the use
of computer graphics becomes increasingly popular in television
commercials and large animation firms. Passive CRT systems are
preferred over active consoles for various reasons. First, the input
capabilities of the active scope are rarely used in computer
animation. Second, passive CRTs come equipped with built-in film
recorders. Third, a synchronization problem can arise when filming
from an active CRT scope caused by the periodic "refreshing" of the
image. This is similar to the "rolling" phenomenon that often occurs
in the filming of a televised program. The problem is avoided in
passive systems since each frame is drawn only once and the
camera shutter remains open while the frame is drawn.

 

The terms "on-line," "off-line," and "real time" are used in
describing computer output systems. Most digital plotting systems
are designed to operate either on-line or off-line with the computer.
In an on-line system, plot commands are fed directly from the
computer to the CRT. In an off-line system, plot commands are
recorded on magnetic tape that can instruct the plotter at a later
time. The term "real time" refers specifically to temporal relationships
between the CRT, the computer, and the final film or the human
operator's interaction with the computing system. For example, a
real-time interaction between the artist and the computer is possible
by drawing on the face of the CRT with the light pen. Similarly, if a
movie projected at the standard 24 fps has recorded the CRT display
exactly as it was drawn by the computer, this film is said to be a real-
time representation of the display. A live-action shot is a real-time
document of the photographed subject, whereas single-frame
animation is not a real-time image, since more time was required in
recording than in projecting.

 

Very few computer films of significant complexity are recorded in
real-time operation. Only one such film, Peter Kamnitzer's City-
Scape, is discussed in this book. This is primarily because the hardware
necessary to do real-time computer filmmaking is rare and
prohibitively expensive, and because real-time photography is not of
crucial importance in the production of aesthetically-motivated films.
In the case of John Whitney's work, for example, although the

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema 199

 

imagery is preconceived for movie projection at 24 fps, it is filmed at
about 8 fps. Three to six seconds are usually required to produce
one image, and a twenty-second sequence projected at 24 fps may
require thirty minutes of computer time to generate.

 

Most CRT displays are black-and-white. Although the Sandia
Corporation and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory have achieved
dramatic results with full-color CRTs, the color of most computer
films is added in optical printing of original black-and-white footage,
or else colored filters can be superposed over the face of the CRT
during photography. Full color and partial color displays are available.
As in the case of City-Scape, however, a great deal of color
quality is lost in photographing the CRT screen. Movies of color CRT
displays invariably are washed-out, pale, and lack definition. Since
black-and-white film stocks yield much higher definition than color
film stocks, most computer films are recorded in black-and-white
with color added later through optical printing.

 

A similar problem exists in computer-generated realistic imagery in
motion. It will be noted that most films discussed here are non-
figurative, non-representational, i.e., concrete. Those films which do
contain representational images— City-Scape, Hummingbird— are
rather crude and cartoon-like in comparison with conventional
animation techniques. Although computer films open a new world of
language in concrete motion graphics, the computer's potential for
manipulation of the realistic image is of far greater relevance for both
artist and scientist. Until recently the bit capacity of computers far
outstripped the potentials of existing visual subsystems, which did
not have the television capability of establishing a continuous scan
on the screen so that each point could be controlled in terms of
shading and color. Now, however, such capabilities do exist and the
tables are turned; the bit capacity necessary to generate television-
quality motion images with tonal or chromatic scaling is enormously
beyond present computer capacity.

 

Existing methods of producing realistic imagery still require some
form of realistic input. The computer does not "understand" a
command to make this portion of the picture dark gray or to give that
line more "character." But it does understand algorithms that
describe the same effects. For example, L. D. Harmon and Kenneth
Knowlton at Bell Telephone have produced realistic pictures by

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

200 Expanded Cinema

 

scanning photographs with equipment similar to television cameras.
The resulting signals are converted into binary numbers representing
brightness levels at each point. These bits are transferred to
magnetic tape, providing a digitized version of the photograph for
computer processing. Brightness is quantized into eight levels of
density represented by one of eight kinds of dots or symbols. They
appear on the CRT in the form of a mosaic representation of the
original photograph. The process is both costly and time consuming,
with far less "realistic" results than conventional procedures.

 

The Computer Image Company of Denver, Colorado, has devised
two unique methods of producing cartoon-like representational
computer graphics in real-time, on-line operation. Using special
hybrid systems with the advantages of both digital and analogue
computers, they generate images through optical scanning or
acoustical and anthropometric controls. In the scanning process,
called Scanimate, a television camera scans black-and-white or
color transparencies; this signal is input to the Scanimate computer
where it is segmented into as many as five different parts, each
capable of independent movement in synchronization with any audio
track, either music or commentary. The output is recorded directly
onto film or videotape as an integral function of the Scanimate
process.

 

The second computer image process, Animac, does not involve
optical scanning. It generates its own images in conjunction with
acoustical or anthropometric analogue systems. In the first instance
the artist speaks into a microphone that converts the electrical
signals into a form that modulates the cartoon image on the CRT.
The acoustical input animates the cartoon mouth while other facial
characteristics are controlled simultaneously by another operator. In
the second method an anthropometric harness is attached to a
person— a dancer, for example— with sensors at each of the skeletal
joints. If the person moves his arm the image moves its arm; when
the person dances the cartoon character dances in real-time
synchronization, with six degrees of freedom in simulated three-
dimensional space. It should be stressed that these cartoon images
are only "representational" and not "realistic." The systems were
designed specifically to reduce the cost of commercial filmmaking
and not to explore serious aesthetic potentials. It's obvious, however,
that such techniques could be applied to artistic investigation and to
nonobjective graphic compositions.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema 201

 

Reclining nude scanned from photo and
reconstructed by computer using bright-ness-level
symbols. By L. D. Harmon and Kenneth C.
Knowlton. Photo: Bell Telephone Laboratories.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

202 Expanded Cinema

 

Charles Csuri: Hummingbird. 1967,
16mm. Black and white. 10 min.
Computer-manipulations of hand-
drawn figure using xy plotting
coordinates.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema 203

 

Professor Charles Csuri's computer film, Hummingbird, was produced
by digital scanning of an original hand-drawing of the bird.
The computer translated the drawing intoxy plotting coordinates and
processed variations on the drawing, assembling, disassembling,
and distorting its perspectives. Thus the images were not computer-
generated so much as computer-manipulated. There's no actual
animation in the sense of separately-moving parts. Instead a static
image of the bird is seen in various perspectives and at times is
distorted by reversals of the polar coordinates. Software
requirements were minimal and the film has little value as art other
than its demonstration of one possibility in computer graphics.

 

Limitations of computer-generated realistic imagery exist both in
the central processing hardware as well as visual output subsystems.
Advancements are being made in output subsystems that
go beyond the present bit-capacity of most computers. Chief among
these is the "plasma crystal" panel, which makes possible billboard
or wallsize TV receivers as well as pocket-size TV sets that could be
viewed in bright sunlight. The Japanese firms of Mitsubishi and
Matsushita (Panasonic) seem to be leaders in the field, each having
produced workable models. Meanwhile virtually every major
producer of video technology has developed its own version. One of
the pioneers of this process in the United States was Dr. George
Heilmeier of RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton,
New Jersey. He describes plasma crystals (sometimes called liquid
crystals) as organic compounds whose appearance and mechanical
properties are those of a liquid, but whose molecules tend to form
into large orderly arrays akin to the crystals of mica, quartz, or
diamonds. Unlike luminescent or fluorescing substances, plasma
crystals do not emit their own light: they're read by reflected light,
growing brighter as their surroundings grow brighter.

 

It was discovered that certain liquid crystals can be made
opalescent, and hence reflecting, by the application of electric
current. Therefore in manufacturing such display systems a
sandwich is formed of two clear glass plates, separated by a thin
layer of clear liquid crystal material only one-thousandth of an inch
thick. A reflective mirror-like conductive coating is deposited on the
inside face of one plate, in contact with the liquid. On the inside of
the other is deposited a transparent electrically-conductive coating of
tin oxide. When an electric charge from a battery or wall outlet is

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

204 Expanded Cinema

 

Prototype for flat, wall-size TV screens and computer visualization subsystems of the
future: Dr. George Heilmeier demonstrates RCA's liquid crystal display. Photo: RCA.

 

applied between the two coatings, the liquid crystal molecules are
disrupted and the sandwich takes on the appearance of frosted
glass. The frostiness disappears, however, as soon as the charge is
removed.

 

In order to display stationary patterns such as letters, symbols, or

 

still images, the coatings are shaped in accordance with the desired

 

pattern. To display motion the conductive coatings are laid down in

 

the form of a fine mosaic whose individual elements can be charged

 

independently, in accordance with a scanning signal such as is

 

presently used for facsimile, television, and other electronic displays.

 

To make the images visible in a dark room or outdoors at night, both

 

coatings are made transparent and a light source is installed at

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Cybernetic Cinema 205

 

the edge of the screen. In addition it is possible to reflect a strong
light from the liquid crystal display to project its images, enlarged
many times, onto a wall or screen.

 

The implications of the plasma crystal display system are vast.
Since it is, in essence, a digital system composed of hundreds of
thousands of discrete picture elements (PIXELS), it obviously is
suitable as a computer graphics subsystem virtually without
limitation if only sufficient computing capabilities existed. The bit
requirements necessary for computer generation of real-time
realistic images in motion are as yet far beyond the present state of
the art.

 

This is demonstrated in a sophisticated video-computer system
developed by Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California,
for translation of television pictures from Mars in the various Mariner
projects. This fantastic system transforms the real-time TV signal
into digital picture elements that are stored on special data-discs.
The picture itself is not stored; only its digital translation. The JPL
video system consists of 480 lines of resolution, each line composed
of 512 individual points. One single image, or "cycle," is thus defined
by 245,760 points. In black-and-white, each of these points,
individually selectable, can be set to display at any of 64 desired
intensities on the gray scale between total black and total white.
Possible variations for one single image thus amount to 64 times
245,760. For color displays, the total image can be thought of as
three in-dependent images (one for each color constituent, red, blue,
and green) or can be taken as a triplet specification for each of the
480 times 512 points. With each constituent being capable of 64
different irradiating levels in the color spectrum, a theoretical total of
262,144 different color shadings are possible for any given point in
the image. (The average human eye can perceive only 100 to 200
different color shadings.)

 

These capabilities are possible only for single motionless images.
Six bits of information are required to produce each of the 245,760
points that constitute one image or cycle, and several seconds are
necessary to complete the cycle. Yet JPL scientists estimate that a
computing capability of at least two megacycles (two million cycles)
per second would be required to generate motion with the same
image-transforming capabilities.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

206 Expanded Cinema

 

It is quite clear that human communication is trending toward these
possibilities. If the visual subsystems exist today, it's folly to assume
that the computing hardware won't exist tomorrow. The notion of
"reality" will be utterly and finally obscured when we reach that point.
There'll be no need for "movies" to be made on location since any
conceivable scene will be generated in totally convincing reality
within the information processing system. By that time, of course,
movies as we know them will not exist. We're entering a mythic age
of electronic realities that exist only on a metaphysical plane.
Meanwhile some significant work is being done in the development
of new language through computer-generated, nonrepresentational
graphics in motion. I've selected several of the most prominent
artists in the field and certain films, which, though not aesthetically-
motivated, reveal possibilities for artistic exploration. We'll begin with
the Whitney family: John, Sr., and his brother James inaugurated a
tradition; the sons John, Jr., Michael, and Mark are the first second-
generation computer-filmmakers in history.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Computer Films

 

John Whitney: Composing an Image of Time

 

"My computer program is like a piano. I could continue to use it creatively all my
life."

 

The foremost computer-filmmaker in the world today, John Whitney
has for more than thirty years sought new language through
technological resources beyond human capacity. He has, however,
remained resolutely "humanist" in his approach, constantly striving to
reach deep emotional awarenesses through a medium essentially
austere and clinical. He has realized his goal to a remarkable
degree, yet he would be the first to admit that there is a long way to
go. "Computer graphic systems," he has said, "present an
opportunity to realize an art of graphics in motion with potentials that
are only now conceivable and have never been explored."

 

In his essay "Systems Esthetics," Jack Burnham observed:
"Scientists and technicians are not converted into artists, rather the
artist becomes a symptom of the schism between art and technics.
Progressively, the need to make ultrasensitive judgments as to the
uses of technology and scientific information becomes 'art' in the
most literal sense."24 Whitney is making those judgments with a
powerful extension of his brain.

 

Following studies at Pomona College in California, Whitney spent
a year in Europe where he studied photography and musical
composition. In 1940 he began specializing in concrete designs in
motion, working with his brother James on animated films which won
first prize at the first Experimental Film Festival in Belgium in 1949.

 

Early in the 1950's he experimented with the production of 16mm.
films for television and in 1952 wrote, produced, and directed
engineering films on guided missile projects for Douglas Aircraft. He
was a director of animated films at UPA in Hollywood for one year.
The title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was among the

 

24Jack Burnham, "Systems Esthetics,"Artforum (September, 1968), pp. 30-35.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

208 Expanded Cinema

 

work he produced in association with Saul Bass during this period.
Following that he directed several short musical films for CBS
television, and in 1957 worked with Charles Eames assembling a
seven-screen presentation for the Fuller Dome in Moscow. Each
screen was the size of a drive-in movie screen.

 

In 1960 Whitney founded Motion Graphics Inc., producing motion-
picture and television title sequences and commercials. Much of this
work was done with his own invention, a mechanical analogue
computer for specialized animation with typography and concrete
design. In 1962 he was named Fellow of the Graham Foundation for
Advanced Study in the Fine Arts. Finally, after approximately a
decade, he found himself free once again to begin experimenting
with less commercial, more aesthetic, problems of motion graphics.

 

The analogue computer work gained Whitney a worldwide reputation,
and in the spring of 1966 International Business Machines
became the first major corporation to take an "artist in residence" to
explore the aesthetic potentials of computer graphics. IBM awarded
Whitney a continuing grant that has resulted in several significant
developments in the area of cybernetic art. Whether working with
hand-drawn animation cards or highly abstract mathematical
concepts, Whitney has always displayed an artist's intuition and a
technologist's discipline. He is a man of tomorrow in the world of
today.

 

The history of cybernetics reached a milestone during World War II
with the development of guidance and control mechanisms for
antiaircraft artillery. Two men riding a telescope table sighted enemy
aircraft and followed their penetration into the battery range. Selsyn
motors in the gun-director mechanism automatically aimed an entire
battery of guns while analogue computers set fuse times on
explosive shells and specified true-intercept trajectories from data
fed into the ballistics equation from movements of the operators.

 

An M-5 Antiaircraft Gun Director provided the basic machinery for
Whitney's first mechanical analogue computer in the late 1950's.
This complex instrument of death now became a tool for producing
benevolent and beautiful graphic designs. Later Whitney augmented
the M-5 with the more sophisticated M-7, hybridizing the machines
into a mammoth twelve-foot-high device of formidable complexity

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Computer Films 209

 

John Whitney working with his mechanical
analogue computer. Photo: Charles Eames.

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

210 Expanded Cinema

 

upon which most of the business of Motion Graphics was conducted
for many years.

 

Similar to the analogue device built by Whitney's brother James for
the production of Lapis, but far more complex, the machine consists
of primary, secondary, and tertiary rotating tables, cam systems, and
other surfaces for pre-programming of image and motion sequences
in a multiple-axis environment. Whitney's son John, Jr., an electronics
genius who improved his father's device as a teen-ager by
rewiring and implementing its circuitry, explains the basic functions
of the machine:

 

There's not one function that isn't variable. The whole master table rotates and
so does every part in it, as well as moving laterally, horizontally, and in some
cases vertically. The camera moves in the same way completely independent of
the rest of the machine, or in synchronization with it. I don't know how many
simultaneous motions can be happening at once. There must be at least five
ways just to operate the shutter. The input shaft on the camera rotates at 180
rpm, which results in a photographing speed of about 8 fps. That cycle time is
constant, not variable, but we never shoot that fast. It takes about nine seconds
to shoot one frame because the secondary rotating tables require nine seconds
to make one revolution. During this nine-second cycle the tables are spinning on
their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis while moving
horizontally across the range of the camera, which itself may be turning or
zooming up and down. During this operation we can have the shutter open all the
time, or just at the end for a second or two, or at the beginning, or for half of the
time if we want to do slit-scanning.

 

The elder Whitney actually never produced a complete, coherent
movie on the analogue computer because he was continually
developing and refining the machine while using it for commercial
work. It remained for his sons John and Michael to make full creative
use of this device that had dominated their childhood from earliest
recollection. However, Whitney did assemble a visual catalogue of
the effects he had perfected over the years. This film, simply titled
Catalogue, was completed in 1961 and proved to be of such
overwhelming beauty that many persons still prefer Whitney's
analogue work over his digital computer films.

 

The machine, like the digital computer, not only facilitated the quick
and effortless rendering of complex geometrical shapes and

 

ARTSCILAB 2001

 

Computer Films 211

 

Left: Camera zoom lens (center) focusing into
primary rotating table of Whitney mechanical
analogue computer. (Photo: Charles Eames)

 

Below: