Expanded Cinema, by Gene Youngblood (pdf)
Page 41: “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 relationship in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.
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 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.
“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 is 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.”
If you like what this excerpt says, you can download the PDF. It starts with R. Buckminster Fuller’s introduction which is awfully long. So if you want to get started reading Gene Youngblood’s work, it starts in the Preface on page 41 of the pdf.
Blissly Blithe 