Gene Youngblood, ‘father’ of expanded cinema, was a friend and associate of Fuller’s in the 1960s and 70s. Youngblood became interested in Fuller in the late 1960s when he was a film critic and columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press. In the early fall of 1968, Youngblood wrote a letter to Fuller describing ideas for both a film project and an upcoming book. Dated
September 5th, the letter explains that Youngblood had discovered Bucky’s writings through conversations with John McHale and Ed Schlossberg. Youngblood, like Fuller, believed deeply that human beings were travelling down a wrong and dangerous path and that art was a realm in which our senses and thoughts about the world could be enlivened, and, indeed, expanded. Youngblood explains to Fuller in this letter that he has been inspired to make movies “which relate more to the world you describe than the world perpetuated by Hollywood cinema.” He describes a new book in the works, one that would be about the use of new technology in cinema —“3-D, computer films, multiple imagery, stereo projection, hemispherical environments, etc.”122 This book would become the seminal Expanded Cinema (1970) and Fuller would be given the honours of writing its introduction.
Youngblood’s use of the term ‘expanded cinema’ describes “an explosion of the frame outward towards immersive, interactive, and interconnected forms of culture.”123 His Expanded
Cinema is a diverse collection of essays that meditate on many different emerging technologies
and the ways in which they are breaking down traditions and boundaries of cinema and art in general. He documents the multiplication of screens in artistic experiments that employ varying image technologies—video, holography, multiple film formats, slide projectors, TV monitors,
122 Letter from Gene Youngblood to Buckminster Fuller, R. Buckminster Fuller Collections, M1090, Series 2, Box
209, Folder 3, Stanford University Archives, Palo Alto, California, USA.
123 Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord, eds., Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto
and early computers—and that are that displayed across a variety of spaces—galleries and artist centres, planetariums, classrooms, concert stages, and more.124
The work is famous for what Andrew Uroskie calls Youngblood’s “unapologetically funky, tie-dyed, star-child ethos.”125 It opens with a fitting image in this regard: “a hairy,
buckskinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated holograms or krypton laser interferometry,”126 who heralds a new ‘Paleocybernetic Age’ as the new dawn of Man. Indeed, as Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord write, “the intense utopianism of Youngblood’s era is embedded in every page of his book—from the idea of the collective ownership of the Earth and the cosmic
consciousness of its citizens to the…final chapter’s assertion that the ‘open empire’ balancing nature and technology is all but upon us.”127 Youngblood is a figure who represents the close link between the counterculture of the 60s and 70s and the emergent cyber-culture, as well documented by Fred Turner.128
As a filmmaker, Youngblood loathed commercial cinema, which, according to him, frustratingly portrayed a ‘reality’ that didn’t exist.129 In line with the critiques of cinema
emerging out of the inchoate field of film theory in the 1970s, Youngblood viewed mainstream cinema as a mind-numbing apparatus that lulls an audience into passivity and complacency. However, instead of using an Althusserian-structuralist framework to speak of the cinematic
124 Tess Takahashi, “Experimental Screens in the 1960s and 1970s: The Site of Community,” Cinema Journal 51.2
(Winter 2012): 162.
125 Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and White Cube (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 9. 126 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton Press, 1970), 1.
127 Marchessault and Lord, eds., Fluid Screens, 7.
128 See: Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise
of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
apparatus, Youngblood employs ecological/cybernetic terms. He states: “Commercial entertainment may be considered a closed system since entropy dominates the feedback process—to satisfy the profit motive it must give audience what is expects” and “since the viewer remains passive and is acted upon by the experiences rather than participating in it with volition, there’s no feedback, that vital source of negentropy.”130
Art, for Youngblood, should operate as a negentropic force. It should not confirm what we already know and believe, nor should it be relegated to the confines of a gallery or a cinema. It should move beyond traditional borders, connect with a larger environment, and challenge our understanding of the world. Expanded cinema is often described as being an artwork that brings facets of the cinematic apparatus out from the screen and into an environment. But what makes it ‘expanded’ is not only its architectural or technological form. Youngblood states: “the act of creation of the artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena both physical and metaphysical.”131 In short, expanded cinema expands consciousness.
Fuller of course was not invested in cinema per se, but he shared Youngblood’s vision of an immersive technological apparatus that would function as a consciousness expander.
Unbeknownst to Youngblood when he wrote that initial letter, Bucky had in fact already designed a spherical, moving image environment that answered Youngblood’s call for an
“aesthetic application of technology” that could achieve a “new consciousness to match our new environment.”132 Fuller called this apparatus the Geoscope. As we will see, the Geoscope, and
130 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 64. 131 Ibid., 346.
later the World Game, are deeply informed by a systems worldview; and like Youngblood, Fuller employed cybernetic and ecological theories to design and describe his apparatus.
Fuller was also interested in negentropy. He used it both as a conceptual base and an operational modality of his designs. Inspiration for his thought and designs came from the patterns and processes of nature. According to Fuller, nature’s blueprints which “disclosed an extraordinarily sublime, a priori orderliness” are the patterns on which the human sphere—our built environment, social organization, and cultural artefacts—should be based.133 ‘Nature’ was his aesthetic model; his designs can be understood as forms of biomimicry. Rather than building, dwelling, and thinking against or in spite of the “patterned dynamism of the natural world,” he believed in a process of working with and within the efficiency of nature.134 For him, the natural world, through the process of evolution, found ‘design solutions’ that optimized the expenditure of energy, whereas the human realm had gone completely astray from this well-organized system. Humankind, for instance, created technologies that expended much more energy—in the long run—than available on the planet. If we looked to nature, he thought that ways of
‘economizing’ across all aspects of human life could be discovered.135
The geodesic dome provides a clear example of how working with nature for design blueprints was put into practice. The design emerged from Fuller’s question: what would an enclosed structure look like if it were to fulfil the requirements of being as strong, lightweight,
133 R. Buckminster Fuller, “The Music of the New Life,” in Utopia or Oblivion: the Prospects for Humanity (New
York: Overlook Press, 1969), 75.
134 Scott Eastman, American Dreamer: Bucky Fuller and the Sacred Geometry of Nature (Cambridge: The
Lutterworth Press, 2007), 18.
135 I should be clear that Fuller did not want to stop ‘progress’ or return to some kind of mythical ‘more natural’ way
of living. Human technology and our built environments were very much a part of the evolutionary processes (we will see this later in the discussion of the biosphere/noosphere) but human beings hadn’t yet quite found the best way to use our technological appendages.
large, and easy to assemble as possible?136 The answer was found in the molecular foundations of organic life, the sub-structures of which most ‘things’ in the world are built. He found that the triangle was the most efficient and strong shape and thus based his designs for the dome on this shape found throughout nature.
It should be noted that ‘nature,’ for Fuller, was very broadly construed—it encompassed everything, from the molecular to the cosmic. Fuller was less interested with the way in which natural phenomena appeared as whole forms and more concerned with both their structural components and the way they interacted with other phenomena. So rather than isolating
phenomena, Fuller adopted a perspective that took the object’s surroundings into consideration. A continuing thread throughout his oeuvre is the idea that in attempting to solve any problem one must always ‘start with the universe.’ Starting with the universe meant quite simply starting from very vast or broad and working back to the special case. It was a mantra that asks one to find patterns and connections between seemingly disparate things; it was a mode of comprehensive thinking.137 Throughout his life, Fuller wanted to find ways to illuminate the radical
interconnectivity of the world, and even, the cosmos.138 In this respect, the ethos of ‘expansion’ takes on new meaning: if Youngblood’s expanded cinema wished to dissolve spatial, formal,
136 R. Buckminster Fuller, “Prevailing Conditions in the Arts,” Utopia or Oblivion, 115-152.
137 Fuller was a great opponent of specialization. He believed the continual narrowing of specialized fields in
academia created a community of scholars who were perhaps individually brilliant, but unable to speak each other’s language. Not only does such specialization create an increasingly hierarchical society in which the ‘general public’ are estranged from an academic-elite, but it also espouses a perception of phenomena as discrete. See Fuller, “Origins of Specialization,” in Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth, 33-42.
138 “Synergetics” is the name that Fuller gave to both his exploratory strategy of starting with the whole and to his
geometry that he developed based on triangles and tetrahedrons – the shapes that are the foundations of all carbon chemistry of organic life.As Scott Eastman explains in his book American Dreamer: Bucky Fuller and the Sacred Geometry of Nature, ‘synergy’ comes from Greek and means “working together.” In Fuller’s time, it had currency solely in chemistry, but had also been used in theology. It was first used by St. Paul in Epistles (Rom. 8:28; I Cor. 3.9) to “illustrate not a static but a dynamic conception of human, divine, and cosmic cooperation: ‘I did the planning, Apollos the watering, but god made things grow … We are fellow workers (synergoi) with God; you are God’s farm, God’s building.’” As Eastman also notes, it has since the 70s become a key word in the business sector. Eastman, American Dreamer, 29.
institutional, and technological boundaries of cinema and media, Fuller was interested in
dissolving much vaster boundaries, namely, those structuring the human sphere and the ‘natural’ world.139
As expanded media works, The Geoscope and the World Game wanted to reveal the planet in its entirety, with the aim of bringing about far-reaching cultural transformations. 140 For Fuller, this cultural transformation would be instigated by the formation of a planetary
consciousness. In his keynote speech at the Vision ’65 conference, Fuller asserted: “We’re going to have to have some way for all humanity to see total Earth. Nothing could be more prominent in all the trending of all humanity today than the fact that we are soon to become world man; yet we are greatly frustrated by all of our local, static organizations of an obsolete yesterday.”141 Such a request to see the ‘whole’ Earth would famously be put on a button by Stewart Brand in 1967 and was seemingly fulfilled with the publication of the Apollo photos shortly after.142 Fuller, however, was not asking for a photograph. What was needed was a perspective of total Earth; for him, this meant a complex cybernetic model of Earth and its systems. This is what the Geoscope and the World Game attempted to do.
139 This is not to say that he did not envision a hierarchy of earthly entities. He clearly assumed that human beings
were the ‘commanders’ of Spaceship Earth.
140 Eastman, American Dreamer, 9.
141 Vision 65 Lecture, Fuller Collection, M1090, Series 18, Box 39, Folder 1.
Image 1, Buckminster Fuller, The Dymaxion Map, 1954, The Buckminster Fuller Institute