- Stan Vanderbeek
Stan Vanderbeek (
January 6 1927 -September 19 1984 ) was an Americanexperimental film maker.VanDerBeek studied art and architecture first at Cooper Union College in New York and then at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he met architectBuckminster Fuller , composerJohn Cage , and choreographerMerce Cunningham . VanDerBeek began his career in the 1950s making independent art film while learning animation techniques and working painting scenery and set designs for the American TV show,Winky Dink and You . His earliest films, made between 1955 and 1965 mostly consist of animated paintings andcollage s, combined in a form of organic development.VanDerBeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and dadaist collages on
Max Ernst , but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of theBeat Generation . In the 1960s, VanDerBeek began working with the likes ofClaes Oldenburg andAllan Kaprow , as well as representatives of modern dance, such asMerce Cunningham andYvonne Rainer . Building his Movie Drome theater atStony Point, New York , at just about the same time, he designed shows using multiple projectors. These presentations contained a very great number of random image sequences and continuities, with the result that none of the performances were alike.His desire for the utopian led him to work with
Ken Knowlton in a co-operation atBell Labs , where dozens of computer animated films and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967 Vanderbeek createdPoem Field , a series of 8 computer-generated animations withKen Knowlton .During the same period, he taught at many universities, researching new methods of representation, from the steam projections at the Guggenheim Museum to the interactive television transmissions of his
Violence Sonata broadcast on several channels in 1970. He ran theUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County visual arts program until his death.
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