Artists discovering animation in the mid-1960s and early 1970s did so in a culture of pop art, psychedelia and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. They responded by creating overwhelming works of graphic collage, violent flickering colours and sensory overload. Exploded View begins with a look at several foundational works from animators whose explorations of radical form and content stood out in the 1960s, from established figures like Stan Vanderbeek and Disney animator Ward Kimball to lesser-known, underground artists such as Fred Mogubgub and Irene Duga.
Microscope Gallery is pleased to announce Dreamlands: Expanded, a series of expanded cinema events organized in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the exhibition "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016”. The ten event, two-and-a-half month long series complements and extends the scope of the exhibit, from the installation works on the museum’s fifth-floor and the film screening program in its third-floor theater, across the East River to include historical and contemporary performance works that collectively propose alternative ways to perceive, conceive, and consider the image in motion.
“The first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.” (Wikipedia)
In 1965, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) unveiled his Movie-Drome, made from the repurposed top of a grain silo. VanDerBeek envisioned Movie-Drome as the prototype for a communications system—a global network of Movie-Dromes linked to orbiting satellites that would store and transmit images. With networked two-way communication, Movie-Dromes were meant to ameliorate technology’s alienating impulse.
Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art.
