"I've never had an experience with a book like I had with Expanded Cinema. Gene Youngblood saw something nobody else saw and extrapolated it twenty iterations forward. I'm just completely amazed, every time, to realize how prescient he was."-Bill Viola
"Gene Youngblood didn't just capture the zeitgeist of his generation. He was the zeitgeist of his generation."-Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
"Gene Youngblood is the medium's Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote our Declaration of Independence, who marked out a vision of media and democracy that remains an invaluable guide to media culture and a document of extraordinary vision and prophecy."-Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
"Expanded Cinema is one of the most prescient books written about our modern age."-Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art
First published in 1970, 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. This fiftieth-anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world.
Gene Youngblood is a well-known theorist of electronic media arts and a respected scholar in the history and theory of experimental film and video art. He has split his career between teaching and journalism and is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the Media Democracy movement.