Gray Area Reads! Expanded Cinema with Ceci Moss

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/17
11:00am - 1:00pm

Join Gene Youngblood and Gray Area in reading and discussing Expanded Cinema together.

Gray Area Reads! takes a look at some of the original works around media theory, the confluence of art and technology, and the impact of technology on society and culture. Together we will work our way through discussions around how culture and technology can engage with society.

For our first edition we will start with a book enormously influential to our thinking around immersive art, Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema.

When: Sunday May 17, 11am
Where: Online
Cost: Suggested Donation $15

For more information, visit and register on our website https://grayarea.org/event/expanded-cinema-book-club-with-gene-youngblood/

About Expanded Cinema:

First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world.

To mark its fiftieth-anniversary re-release by Fordham University Press, join Gray Area in a virtual book club and weekly conversation about Expanded Cinema, with author Gene Youngblood. This edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world.

A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail.

Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the art historical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

Ceci Moss

Ceci Moss is a curator, writer and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of Gas, a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art. Her academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her first book Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu is released through the Bloomsbury series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, CURA, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, and Special Projects Coordinator at the New Museum. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California and she has held teaching positions at Scripps College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and New York University.

Gene Youngblood

Gene Youngblood is an internationally known theorist of media arts and politics. His book Expanded Cinema (1970), the first to consider video as an art form, was seminal in establishing Media Art as a recognized scholarly and artistic discipline. He is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement, and has been teaching, writing and lecturing on the subject since 1970. Michael Parenti has called Youngblood “a leading critic of media culture.” BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast thinks he’s “a true revolutionary.” Alternative Radio founder David Barsamian notes Youngblood’s “deep and early insight into how culture is manufactured.” Film director Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop) calls him “one of our great natural resources.” Actor-activist Peter Coyote says Youngblood “illuminates dark corners … reminding us that ethics and morality are essential parts of the agreement we call reality.” Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist, says Youngblood’s writings on counterculture “capture the spirit of a time when there was an evolutionary jump in consciousness, inspiring a sense of hope that it’s happening again now.”