Cross-Disciplinary Research Networks and Universal Communications: Stan VanDerBeek’s Multimedia Collaborations.

My project conducts a cultural history of the postwar period in North America, by investigating experimental cinema’s entanglement within a network of interdisciplinary and multimedia experimentations. Specifically, I focus on the interactions of filmmaker Stanley VanDerBeek with two interdisciplinary projects that were conceived as investigations on the interrelation of art, new media, technology, and anthropology: the Explorations research group –led by Marshall McLuhan and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter– and Experiments in Art and Technology –launched in 1966 by a group of engineers and artists. VanDerBeek produced a large corpus of writings on his vision of cinema as an “expanded medium,” and his search for a “non-verbal international picture-language.” I contend that this universalist ideal to connect the entire world through media has its roots not only in the discipline of communication but also anthropology. Experimental cinema is a fragment of these cultural and scientific interactions, and crystalizes their articulation in a coherent discourse.

Faculty Supervisor:

Catherine Russell

Student:

Partner:

New York University

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

Concordia University

Program: