EXPANDED CINEMA
by Gene Youngblood
Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller
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
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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)
To Nancy
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.
Contents
Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller
Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology by R. Buckminster Fuller
Preface
Part One: The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment
Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Age
The Intermedia Network as Nature
Popular Culture and the Noosphere
Art, Entertainment, Entropy
Retrospective Man and the Human Condition
The Artist as Design Scientist
Part Two: Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama
Global Closed Circuit: The Earth as Software
Synaesthetic Synthesis: Simultaneous Perception of Harmonic Opposites
Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage
Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness
Synaesthetics and Kinaesthetics: The Way of All Experience
Mythopoeia: The End of Fiction
Synaesthetics and Synergy
Synaesthetic Cinema and Polymorphous Eroticism
Synaesthetic Cinema and Extra-Objective Reality
Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age
Part Three: Toward Cosmic Consciousness
2001: The New Nostalgia
The Stargate Corridor
The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson
Part Four: Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films
The Technosphere: Man/Machine Symbiosis
The Human Bio-Computer and His Electronic Brainchild
Hardware and Software
The Aesthetic Machine
Cybernetic Cinema
Computer Films
Part Five: Television as a Creative Medium
The Videosphere
Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics
Synaesthetic Videotapes
Videographic Cinema
Closed-Circuit Television and Teledynamic Environments
Part Six: Intermedia
The Artist as Ecologist
World Expositions and Nonordinary Reality
Cerebrum: Intermedia and the Human Sensorium
Intermedia Theatre
Multiple-Projection Environments
Part Seven: Holographic Cinema: A New World
Wave-Front Reconstruction: Lensless Photography
Dr. Alex Jacobson: Holography in Motion
Limitations of Holographic Cinema
Projecting Holographic Movies
The Kinoform: Computer-Generated Holographic Movies
Technoanarchy: The Open Empire
Selected Bibliography
Index
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-months-old 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 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."