Taking late media theorist Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) as a point of departure, this curatorial research project, lead by Hannah Scott, will trace the evolution of communication as both medium and subject matter in artistic practice. The loosely defined medium of Expanded Cinema emerged from a world on the brink of a communications revolution, when new technologies shifted the circulation of information within a social body away from one-to-many and toward many-to-many transmission. This profound restructuring of the information ecosystem sowed fertile ground for artists to prototype the kinds of networked modes of communication and media production we take for granted today. As communications technologies evolved, the specter of liberation through the distribution of the means of communication that was central to Expanded Cinema was renegotiated and rearticulated in diverse artistic practices, including real-time video art, phone phreaking, multiplayer virtual reality experiences, and interactive installations. By drawing a line through these variegated practices, as well as critical and theoretical discourse on the medium, from 1970 through the present, this project asks how the speculative ideas about using multimedia environments to prepare audiences for living alongside and through electronic media expressed in Expanded Cinema evolved in the 54 years since its publishing.
Hannah Scott
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