Expanded cinema

Expanded cinema is a term covering film, video, multimedia performance or immersive environments that go beyond the traditional cinema screening and reject the conventional one-way relationship between a passive audience and a flat screen. The term was popularised by the critic and theorist Gene Youngblood in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, in which he understood new screen-based art forms as an extension of human consciousness. In practice, expanded cinema may project images onto multiple screens at once, onto three-dimensional surfaces, bodies or entire rooms; the screening is often combined with performance, live music, light effects and audience participation. Such experiments flourished in the 1960s within underground film and intermedia art, pursued by figures such as Stan VanDerBeek, Carolee Schneemann, the USCO collective and the scene associated with Andy Warhol. Expanded cinema anticipated the emergence of video art, moving-image installation and contemporary immersive media. It questioned the very boundaries of cinema, turning viewing into a spatial, bodily and collective experience rather than the contemplation of a narrative.