Stan VanDerBeek: Poemfield at The Box, Los Angeles; installation view. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek and the Box, L.A. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

On view are five of the eight films that compose VanDerBeek’s Poemfield series, created between 1966 and 1971. They combine poetic texts and abstract graphics designed with an early computer language. Words emerge from a glittering mosaic of colored pixels, and then fade back into the blinking, swirling digital ground. With the exception of Poemfield No. 5 (1968), which uses footage of skydivers, all of the films represent purely computer-generated landscapes. The graphics transform and flicker at a frenetic pace while the poems slowly unfold over about five minutes. The visuals entrance and draw viewers in, but it is the enigmatic texts that hold the attention. VanDerBeek likened his films to illuminated manuscripts, wherein gilt illustrations would entice the reader to focus on the word.

The artist made these films at Bell Labs in collaboration with engineer Ken Knowlton, through Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), an organization founded in part by Robert Rauschenberg. Knowlton had developed BEFLIX, perhaps the earliest computer animation language, which they used to write the scripts for the Poemfield films. These scripts were then run through a computer and channeled into a cathode-ray tube output that was filmed. Artists Bob Brown and Frank Olvey added color. The Box has transferred the original 16mm films to video and restored Poemfield No. 1 (1967) in HD; the difference is striking. The other films jump and stutter with wobbly focus, so that making out the words is a challenge, but the HD version is clear and sharp. This is especially true in a two-tone variant, Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version), which strips away the color so that the original programming is highlighted. Restorations of the rest of the Poemfield series are hopefully underway.

Stan VanDerBeek: Poemfield at the Box, Los Angeles; installation view. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek and the Box, L.A. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

VanDerBeek viewed technology as a source of potential liberation and empowerment, not alienation. This was true for the creation of art as well as for its ability to reach a wide audience. “What spellbinds me as an idea is that I’ll be able to sit someplace in a railroad station and write a movie, or maybe even pick up a telephone eventually and write a movie,” he said in the 1968 film Incredible Machine. He saw the ubiquity of television as an ideal vehicle for the dissemination of artwork. “If the world of the future is a world of ephemeral TV programs and houses which we change as often as we change cars, it may be a world which calls for an art as ephemeral as much of the music which eighteenth-century composers provided for social occasions. Art is more than eternal masterpieces,” he wrote in a 1969 document included in the exhibition catalog.

On the cover of the catalog are images of the punch cards VanDerBeek used to program his films, all numbers and raw data. They resemble the punch cards in Errol Morris’ film The Fog of War, cards that Robert McNamara employs in his coolly efficient planning of the Vietnam War. Technology is not inherently good or bad, but it has the potential to be used for vastly different ends. VanDerBeek realized this dichotomy, noting that his work offered “a possible way to replace ‘war’ games with ‘peace’ games.” The most lucid example of this is Poemfield No. 7 (1967-8), which reproduces the poem “There is no way to Peace – Peace is the way” by anti-war activist A.J. Muste. The most serene film in the show, the poem’s words unfold across a cruciform mandala that recalls multiple spiritual sources.

Stan VanDerBeek: Poemfield at the Box, Los Angeles; installation view. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek and the Box, L.A. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

The one drawback of the show is the works’ sonic environment. VanDerBeek used notable musicians like John Cage and Paul Motian to create soundtracks for each film, but the sounds are not isolated, and in the Box’s cavernous main space they play over each other in a sea of aural cacophony. In adjoining galleries, other films are played on monitors that have headphones, making it all the more apparent how important the unique soundtrack is to each work.

Despite this limitation, the exhibition is a welcome restoration of a digital pioneer whose work bridged high art, progressive ideals, and technology. Instead of encouraging isolation, VanDerBeek saw the computer and the cinema as tools to connect people and enable communication. As he writes in an article on “Disposable Art” (also included in the catalogue), “I believe that motion pictures and related image-thinking holds out a hope for ‘seeing’ ourselves and thus to evolve the ecology most suitable for life, for living…can you see me! can you hear me!”

Stan VanDerBeek: Poemfield is on view at the Box in Los Angeles through November 1, 2014.

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room is quiet and calming. Everyone who has been here talks about the unexpected smiles that slip onto their cynical faces, and it happens to you too.

Installation view Otto Piene: Lichtballett. Photo: Gunter Thorn. All photos courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

To understand what is going on here, you have to look back to the 1960’s, which may have been the high point of art at MIT. During the sixties, arts funding was partially used as a counterbalance to the political consequences from the institute’s complicated and financially fertile military industrial connections. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) was founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes and immediately went about funding exhibitions and visits for some very interesting artists. With the available capital, an unavoidable optimism of postwar boom, and a complete lack of habits (good or bad) Kepes attempted to foster “media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.” (pdf)

Two of the first artists who were invited to visit MIT were Otto Piene and Hans Haacke (as well as Stan VanDerBeek). Piene was in the first round of fellows (meaning he was in residency for a year), and would succeed Kepes as director in 1968. Haacke was invited for a solo show at MIT in 1967. The body of work both presented consisted of systems, those very cloud/water/lights that Kepes hoped to present as art media.

Installation view: Hans Haacke, 1967.

This fall, Haacke’s solo-show has been reproduced at the MIT List Visual Art Center (LVAC). VanDerBeek and Haacke were both deeply influenced by the ideas of cybernetics. Haacke felt that controlling the storm, moving the meteorological indoors, skipped a layer of abstraction and released the artist from reproducing essential features of the world; immediacy was the only type of innovative art left to pursue. Unlike VanDerBeek’s social videos, Haacke created kinetic art systems, objects that set in motion an action that had no end point.

The approachable physicality and comic impossibility of watching a ball float on a jet of air, or seeing a refrigerator coil (covered in frozen ambient humidity) as a sculpture reminds us just how useless art can be; how archaic and aimless we could make our art. These works are unlike our current trends: useful and solemn responses to the internet, the economy, or the social conditions in relation to capitalism. These are objects that bewilder and add to our aesthetic understanding by wonder and query. The closest these sculptures get to being explicit is to make visible the relationship between the whole and the part, between the center and the exterior. 1967 was a very delicate moment in American history: the Vietnam war raging as were race riots, but it was still before the chaos of 1968. Instead of making politics explicit, for which Haacke is usually applauded, these sculptures sing wordless songs about the 1960’s societal changes. These examinations into natural systems granted him tools that he later used to investigate social systems, like the gallery and politics of Germany, but were timely investigations that presage his later work.

Otto Piene: Electric Rose, 1965. Polished aluminum globe with 160 timed neon lamps. Photo: Gunter Thorn

On the other side of the LVAC, Piene’s light sculptures from the 1960 and 1970’s have been painstakingly restored and presented (some for the first time in decades). Despite the opportunity of seeing some vintage Piene sculptures in perfect condition, the two new sculptures, One Cubic Meter of Black Light and Lichtballet steal the show. Both project light through perforations in their skin. Lichtballet is a wall of rotating lights hidden away from sight, the circular pattern of holes in the wall filters the light, manipulating the light into physical motion in the surrounding room. There is almost no reason to look at the objects that Piene has created, instead, you should be looking at their effects on your environment.

The sensations we see flowing around the room are light, directly and with no symbol. Instead of seeing how light lands on a sculptural object, the sculpture provides its own light, and uses the light as a physical material. It may be a sculptural analogy for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Has Piene released light from being a shadow on the wall? It’s hard to tell, as every time you step into the room, you are enthralled by the light show’s charms. You immediately forget any theory laden narratives you may have about the work, and instead experience the motion and change for what it is, a grand environment that undercuts words and explanations. It’s a direct experience. It’s that visceral art that we’ve left behind. It’s an example of Kepes hope to present the art object as a confluence, a meeting of viewer and natural process.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett and Hans Haacke: 1967 are on view at the List Visual Arts Center through Dec 31, 2011.

VanDerBeek’s career was filled with experimental projects in film, early computer art, and the cybernetic-tinged utopian non-verbal communication that moved art into uncharted waters. If Al Gore invented the internet, than VanDerBeek envisioned it first. The working model of visual and cultural lateral leaps found in Mankinda (1957) carries through his later works like Newsreal of Dreams (1976). Each relies on associative leaps made out of a psychedelic arrangement of random things– frenetic, non-stable images morphing and fluctuating their meanings in the blink of an eye. The central work, a recreation of Movie-Drome, contains popular movies, art history slides, and contemporary music entangled in an overwhelming collage that is impossible to completely experience.

The show’s title comes from one futuristic option that came out of his Buckminster Fuller-esque dome for the original Movie-Drome, at Gate Hill Co-op in Stony Point NY. The idea was, that “non-verbal international picture language” could be beamed out via satellite to other domes. These were not motion pictures, but emotion pictures, filed with deep utopian notions of what we are capable of becoming in the future. Today we just make do with UbuWeb, YouTube, and tabbed browsing, but an alternative art broadcast system would be an excellent invention.

VanDerBeek’s cybernetic cold-warrior surroundings pop up in Breathdeath (1963) a few times. This and other works were a huge influence on Terry Gilliam, both during the Do Not Adjust your Set and Monty Python eras. Both Gilliam and VanDerBeek grew up in the post world war era and wore their politics on their sleeves. A central concern was if these new technologies would end in mutually assured self-destruction or if they would free us. There was a fear that technology was out to get us.

His Violence Sonata is probably the most utopian of the work shown. It’s a two hour video that was broadcast on channels 2 and 44 in Boston on January 12, 1970. He hoped that neighbors would get together and watch two televisions simultaneously. This experiment was designed to spark discussions about race relations and violence. There was even a live call-in portion and a studio audience who were asked  “Can man communicate?”

Part of VanDerBeek’s originality stems from his quoting. The use of altered, but popular and accessible images and their loaded messages allowed for cybernetic feedback loops and open systems that MIT was known for during VanDerBeek’s tenure as a Fellow at CAVS. I think in 2011 it is easy to see this type of artwork unconsciously quoted by freshman video classes, but this exhibition creates a coherent vision of VanDerBeek trying to harness these technologies for art’s sake, even if he wasn’t sure that it was possible.

Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom Will be on view at MIT List Visual Art Center from February 4- April 3, 2011. There will be a gallery talk by Fred Barzyk and David Atwood of WGBH on Thursday March 10 about Violence Sonata. March 31 there will be a screening of 16mm films not included in the exhibition. It will also be on view at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from May 14- July 10, 2011.

Stan VanDerBeek with his Movie-Drome, Stony Point, NY. Courtesy Yale School of Architecture

Making films is not easy. Most people know this and almost as many find the difficulties of movie-making enthralling, which explains the proliferation of articles, TV interviews, and radio specials on the subject. Just last week, I nearly pulled off the freeway to better concentrate on radio host Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Oren Moverman, the directed of The Messenger (who, apparently, had 3 different directors, including Sydney Pollack, walk away from the picture before he took the helm himself), and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Quentin Tarantino’s story (told most recently on Tuesday’s Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien) about how his hands, and not the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, came to strangle Diana Kruger’s character in Inglourious Basterds.

This fascination with filmmaking has something, if not everything, to do with the fact that, while the production process may be a tangled mess of misplaced funding and last-minute game-changes, the watching process often feels effortless. Well-made mainstream features are meant to pull you through a seamlessly self-contained fiction that twists and turns, periodically threatening to derail but never actually doing so. They’re meant to leave you strangely satiated, even if you just witnessed an apocalyptic blood bath. Video art and art films, on the other hand, tend to be neither seamless nor satiating; and sometimes, watching them feels like it must be at least as difficult as making them.

On Tuesday night, in a crowded basement auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I listened as Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer talked about, among other things, organizing experimental film events at a museum that has practically obliterated its film budget. Snaring potential backers can be difficult, since Comer’s programming has a reputation for being “aggressively avant-garde”—which is another way of saying films at the Tate require a bit too much of their viewers.

Stan VanDerBeek, March 22, 1969. Inside the Movie-Drome. Courtesy Black Mountain College Museum.

Before Comer took the podium, art historian Gloria Sutton spoke at length about Stan VanDerBeek, a graduate of 1950s Black Mountain College who built the infamous Movie-Drome, a grain silo turned multimedia screening room, in his Stony Point, NY, backyard. He filled his Movie-Drome with an assortment of projectors, so that multiple still and moving images could occupy the curved ceiling at once. VanDerBeek’s films, which resemble fugitively animated Wallace Berman collage, champion what he called the “aesthetics of anticipation.” They ask their audience to stay alert, trace connections between fragments and look for meaning that they will never quite be able to find. They’re demanding and rigorous, but, really, once you’ve decided to submit yourself to them, they’re mostly exhilarating.

In one of VanDerBeek’s best, Poemfield No. 2, a series of pixelated words punctuate the screen then disintegrate into blurs of light and specks of neon color.  At first, you try to read the words for meaning, then the film starts to resemble a sort of absurdest nightmare in which the text becomes unreadable before it’s even materialized. Yet the constantly foiled desire to decipher still propels you through, and you’re always anticipating the moment at which the flickering screen will become legible again–it’s more suspenseful than anything Hitchcock ever made, because the suspense lasts indefinitely.

Note: LACMA will host two more panels on experimental film, one in March and one in May. The dates should be finalized and posted to LACMA’s website in the near future.