Stan VanDerBeek — Poemfield series

1966

Artists: Stan VanDerBeek, Ken Knowlton · Year: 1966 · Medium: Computer-generated 16mm film, color (eight parts) · Substrate: BEFLIX, microfilm plotter; color added photographically in post · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories Stan VanDerBeek was not a Bell Labs scientist. He was an avant-garde filmmaker who had built a sixty-foot domed cinema on his property in upstate New York — the Movie-Drome — and was projecting collage films on the ceiling for audiences lying on the floor. In the mid-1960s he persuaded Ken Knowlton to help him put concrete poetry in motion. The partnership produced eight films between 1966 and 1969, the Poemfield series. The films are kinetic text. Letters materialize on screen in patterns, dissolve, reassemble as different words, vibrate between readings, resolve briefly into sentences. Color was added photographically in post-production, since BEFLIX in 1966 ran on a black-and-white microfilm plotter. A typical Poemfield sequence holds a single concept — presence, silence, relation — through one minute of continuous textual transformation, so that the viewer is never reading, exactly, but is instead watching language behave in ways language does not normally behave. The collaboration was unusual in its reversal of the conventional art-technologist dynamic. VanDerBeek came to Bell Labs with aesthetic and rhythmic intentions already formed, from his work in underground film; Knowlton provided the tools and the computational literacy. Most art-technologist partnerships of the period had the artist adjusting to what the machine made easy. VanDerBeek made Knowlton adjust BEFLIX to what he, VanDerBeek, wanted to see. The long shadow of the Poemfields runs through every kinetic-type opening title, every music-video typographic treatment, every motion-design showreel of the next six decades. The vocabulary of words-as-moving-objects is now so thoroughly normalized that the newness of what VanDerBeek and Knowlton were doing in 1966 is easy to miss. Before them, text on film moved either as a crawl — a static block sliding horizontally — or as a cut, one card replacing another. The idea that individual letters might be independent animated objects whose motions composed the meaning was, in 1966, new. The Poemfields prove this by being the first films that read, as written texts read, differently from how they look. VanDerBeek died in 1996; Knowlton in 2022. The Movie-Drome is gone. Lore VanDerBeek was an avant-garde filmmaker running his own 'Movie-Drome' — a domed cinema in upstate New York where he projected collage films on the ceiling for audiences lying on the floor. He talked his way into Bell Labs as a resident artist in the mid-60s and persuaded Knowlton to help him put concrete poetry in motion. The Poemfields are kinetic text pieces — words that dissolve, rebuild, vibrate, compose themselves — produced entirely with BEFLIX. They are among the earliest works of computer-generated kinetic typography, predating the phrase 'motion graphics' in common use. Sources • Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) — VanDerBeek catalog • Bell Labs Technical Memoranda • Youngblood, Gene — Expanded Cinema (Dutton, 1970)