Movies: Stan VanDerBeek

"Each film was constructed using Knowlton's BEFLIX computer language, which was based on FORTRAN. The films were programmed on a IBM 7094 computer. The films were created in black and white, with color added later by Brown and Olvey." --AT&T Archives...

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"An animated vision... a subliminal glance at man in light and space" S.V....

Stan VanDerBeek, experimental filmmaker at work with friend and computer expert Wade Shaw, at the sophisticated new (1972) computer at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and discussing the inevitable interaction of computers with artistic creati...

A fantasy film of illusive geometry, changing and rebuilding itself by computer animation, unique visual magic done while artist-in-residence at NASA in Houston in conjunction with Richard Weinberg....

Performance art collaboration between Jim Dine and Stan VanDerBeek....

A hypnotic dance film of colours, dancers, forms, music, all sweeping through the TV tube eye, mixed together into a flow of female bodies and colours, a brilliant study of colour printing from black ad white. Collaboration on the project by Brown/Ol...

To create his “Poemfields” (1965-71) series, VanDerBeek worked closely with computer scientist Ken Knowlton and the staff at Bell Labs. Each “Poemfield” was adapted from poems by VanDerBeek, programmed on an IBM 7094 computer in black and white using...

"Words pulsate, then bleed into abstraction. Fields of color fragment into pixels or smear into mutating organisms. Swarming text grids explode into chaotic rainbow clouds, blinking dots, stars, and spirals. Snaking orange lines and pointillist textu...

Strobe Ode is an exercise in video feedback and analog imaging, in which a circular image-field is modified and abstracted by strobe flashes....

Performance by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann....

In Sonia and Stan Paint a Portrait of Ronnie, VanDerBeek and artist Sonia Sheridan assemble a pastiche of images of Ronald Reagan, metamorphosed through digital computer graphics....

Similes of a slippery TV tube gesticulate break and supply – a long view of multiple images (Mr. Johnson's war, is it Howard Johnson's or President Johnson's war?) – a long curving view, breakfast with aspirin, good grief – or Goodbye. (SUPER-IMPOSIT...

Vanderbeek photographs NYC, 1959. The 'meat' of the street: Doorways, debris, dilapidation. We meet a few youngsters and get a glimpse into a bygone era....

"A 'drawn' film, with images that are constantly changing, drawings of landscapes that keep escaping, traces of faces, everything is almost what it is but never stays that way. The soundtrack punches out a wild monotone of dirty, nonsense limericks t...

Poem Field No. 8 is an computer-animated short made in the Beflix programming language....

Poem Field No. 6 is an computer-animated short made in the Beflix programming language....

Poem Field No. 4 is an computer-animated short made in the Beflix programming language....

Influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s spheres, VanDerBeek had the idea for a spherical theater where people would lie down and experience movies all around them. Floating multi-images would replace straight one-dimensional film projection. From 1957 on,...