Stan VanDerBeek — Movie-Drome

1963

Artists: Stan VanDerBeek · Year: 1963 · Medium: Expanded-cinema dome — continuous multi-projector collage film environment · Substrate: Sixty-foot geodesic dome with floor-mounted projectors, slide carousels, and film loops projected onto the ceiling · Place: Stony Point, New York, USA · Institution: Self-built, on VanDerBeek's rural property Stan VanDerBeek built the Movie-Drome on his rural property near Stony Point, New York, between 1963 and 1966, a sixty-foot silver dome with projectors and slide carousels mounted around its perimeter, throwing images upward onto the dome's interior surface. Audiences lay on the floor and looked up. The experience was a continuous wash of collaged images — found footage, photographs, slides, newsreels, VanDerBeek's own animations — layered and overlapping across the entire visual field. What the Movie-Drome proposed was that cinema could escape the rectangular frame and the single point of view. VanDerBeek was explicit about the project's ambition: he argued, in a much-cited essay he published in Film Culture in 1966, that a new form of communication was needed to match the complexity of modern consciousness, and that the Movie-Drome was his prototype. The phrase expanded cinema, which Gene Youngblood would later make the title of his 1970 book, was partly coined to describe what VanDerBeek was doing. The dome itself no longer stands. VanDerBeek toured its logic through installations elsewhere — his Movie-Murals at universities, his Poemfield collaborations with Knowlton at Bell Labs — but the original Stony Point structure fell into disrepair after his death in 1984 and was dismantled in subsequent years. Its ambition, though, flows directly into every contemporary immersive-media practice, from VR to planetarium art to the 360-degree projection installations of Refik Anadol. VanDerBeek asked the question first. Lore VanDerBeek was largely self-taught. He had studied briefly at Black Mountain College in the mid-1950s, where he absorbed the example of Rauschenberg, Cage, and Cunningham working across disciplines. The Movie-Drome was partly funded by a Ford Foundation grant and partly by VanDerBeek's own money, including film work he took on commercial projects. He projected films nightly during the years the dome operated, hosting small audiences of artists and visitors from New York. Gene Youngblood attended, as did Jonas Mekas and Amos Vogel. Sources • VanDerBeek, Stan — "Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema" (Film Culture, 1966) • Youngblood, Gene — Expanded Cinema (Dutton, 1970) • Electronic Arts Intermix — VanDerBeek titles catalog