Abstract

The Experience Machine presents the first in-depth study of American artist Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), who was instrumental in the development of multimedia art during the postwar period. This dissertation analyzes how the perceptual conditions of his conceptual theater called Movie-Drome (1965) engendered an immersive subject by prioritizing multisensory experience over concerns exclusive to visual representation (mimesis or depiction). Movie-Drome was constituent of Expanded Cinema art works that employed several audio and visual projection sources and multiple screens in an intimate live performance environment. By creating an immersive experience that addressed a collective audience, Movie-Drome articulated a particular type of subjectivity for Expanded Cinema that broke from the singular modernist viewing subject of avant-garde film as well as the atomized mass audience associated with broadcast television.

Rather than developing out of a genealogy of cinematic devices, Movie-Drome functioned as a communication tool, or in VanDerBeek's words, an "experience machine" and was situated in the center of the various radical aesthetic sensibilities that exploded in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s including Fluxus, Happenings, Judson Church dance performances, and the minimal music of John Cage, who like VanDerBeek was part of the Land, an artist's colony in upstate New York. The thirty-one-foot-high metal dome structure VanDerBeek built on the Land was a prototype for a communications system in which several dromes would be positioned throughout the world, each linked to an orbiting satellite that would store and transmit images between the various sites. Movie-Drome's emphasis on two-way communication and data transfer introduced a telecommunications model for art production reflecting the larger transformation from a mechanical to information age. Through a close examination of Movie-Drome's formal traits and VanDerBeek's conceptual slides and drawings, this dissertation suggests that Expanded Cinema attempted to address broader political systems of distribution, social regulation, and the mechanization of information. Ultimately, The Experience Machine establishes a new interpretive framework for understanding multimedia art not as an accretion of film and computer technology, but as a critical means to engage the effects of mass media on the wider social and cultural experience of the late 1960s.