The experience machine: Stan VanderBeek's Movie-Dromeand expanded cinema

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (11) ◽  
pp. 52-5691-52-5691
Author(s):  
Jonathan Weinel

This chapter discusses altered states of consciousness in audio-visual media, such as films, psychedelic light shows, and VJ performances. First, some background theory is introduced, explaining the main categories of film sound, and what research tells us regarding the way in which sound influences the perception of visual images and vice versa. Following this background section, a tour is provided through various films that represent altered states of consciousness, including surrealist movies, ‘trance films’, and Hollywood feature films. These demonstrate a progression, where more recent movies are able to make use of digital audio and visual effects to represent the subjective experience of altered states with improved accuracy. Meanwhile, beyond the traditional confines of the cinema, ‘expanded cinema’ works such as visual music, psychedelic light shows, and VJ performances have provided increasingly sophisticated synaesthetic experiences, which are designed to transform the consciousness of their audience.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Gualeni

Problems and questions originally raised by Robert Nozick in his famous thought experiment ‘The Experience Machine’ are frequently invoked in the current discourse concerning virtual worlds. Having conceptualized his Gedankenexperiment in the early seventies, Nozick could not fully anticipate the numerous and profound ways in which the diffusion of computer simulations and video games came to affect the Western world.This article does not articulate whether or not the virtual worlds of video games, digital simulations, and virtual technologies currently actualize (or will actualize) Nozick’s thought experiment. Instead, it proposes a philosophical reflection that focuses on human experiences in the upcoming age of their ‘technical reproducibility’.In pursuing that objective, this article integrates and supplements some of the interrogatives proposed in Robert Nozick’s thought experiment. More specifically, through the lenses of existentialism and philosophy of technology, this article tackles the technical and cultural heritage of virtual reality, and unpacks its potential to function as a tool for self-discovery and self-construction. Ultimately, it provides an interpretation of virtual technologies as novel existential domains. Virtual worlds will not be understood as the contexts where human beings can find completion and satisfaction, but rather as instruments that enable us to embrace ourselves and negotiate with various aspects of our (individual as well as collective) existence in previously-unexperienced guises.


2019 ◽  
pp. 43-56
Author(s):  
Patricia Pisters

This chapter analyzes the film We Can’t Go Home Again (1972–1976), which the American director Nicholas Ray realized in collaboration with a class of students he taught at the State University of New York in Purchase. The film exemplifies the ability of cinema to provide access to an “elsewhere” and “elsewhen,” analyzed by Anne Friedberg in her book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. This chapter claims that the film’s use of multiscreen projection can be illuminated through Friedberg’s notion of the virtual window, developed in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Thanks to the collaboration on the film of video artist Nam June-Paik and the employment of techniques associated with the contemporaneous practice of “expanded cinema,” We Can’t Go Home Again is an important precursor to contemporary digital media.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágnes Pethő

Abstract The article attempts a brief overview and evaluation of the main theoretical approaches that have emerged in the study of cinematic intermediality in the last decades since intermediality has become an established research term in media studies. It distinguishes three major paradigms in theorizing intermedia phenomena and outlines some of the directions of change in the intermedial strategies of recent films. It identifies in contemporary cinema a tendency to add new dimensions to the relations of in-betweenness regarding both the connection of cinema to reality and its inter-art entanglements. Finally, the article describes a new type of intermediality, which integrates elements of trans-textuality, creating a format of expanded cinema within cinema. This strategy is presented in the context of Eastern European cinema through a short case study of Cristi Puiu’s film, Sieranevada (2016).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document