Cinema's Expansion into the Noosphere

Lovingly re-issued (complete with its original 1970 errata), Gene Youngblood's prophetic sacrament of videotronics is as fresh as ever. Expanded Cinema now comes with an introductory mini-memoir by the aptly-named Youngblood (still young-blooded-and-eugened at age 78), showing photographs of the author's shift in habitus from 1967's buttoned-down, clean-shaven reporter to an open-collared, curly-haired, mustachioed 1970's counter-cultural intellectual. The revolution he joined is still vexing theory today, as systems thinking confronts the violence of differences eradicated through black-box thinking, baked-in algorithmic bias, and false universals. Can systems be saved for Youngblood's own progressive politics?

As a historian, I would argue that this urgent question can only be answered if we return to Youngblood's '60s moment of cybernetics to sit with its troubles, revisiting the politics of his manifesto, published in the inaugural number of Radical Software: The Alternate Television Movement (Spring 1970—the graphic is reproduced in his "Introduction" to Expanded Cinema). Here he aspired to "wrench the intermedia network free" from commerce and ownership, but we will need to reckon with his praise for technoanarchy as the presumptive locus for those who will "assume conscious control over the videosphere" in order to place the media "in the service of all humanity." Scholars of Youngblood must hold in mind (as he does) the derivation of cybernetics from the C3 military-industrial complex and systems from bio-management. And as we celebrate, with the author's help, the galvanizing impact of these ideas on the art world, we still need to hold these tools responsible for instrumentalizing racist urban planning and for generating revenue by robotically boosting reactionary political speech. (C3 references the "command, control, communication" imperative at the heart of early cybernetic theory. For a crystallizing take, see Donna Haraway's classic and multiply-anthologized "Cyborg Manifesto," 1984. For a critique of homophily algorithms as biased by segregation models in urban systems science, readers may wish to track down the 2019 work of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun et al., "Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm," published in the journal eflux, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/)

None of the fantastic artists Youngblood celebrates would recognize the future we now inhabit, in which holography has shrunk to an icon on a credit card, and cell-phone charge-coupling devices are algorithmically loaded to recognize the white-skinned human face. Youngblood knew it was possible that things could go wrong, tempering his utopianism by declaring not neo-but "Paleo-cybernetics." Rhetorically, he was insisting that nothing but primitive tool-use had been achieved. We were hominids grasping the crude implements of an unprecedented revolution, troglodytes of a potential shimmering future we had to evolve to achieve. Make no mistake: expanded cinema "actually mean[s] expanded consciousness" as the electrons arranged for human image-making beamed out and jounced with the electrons streaming from newly discovered pulsars and quasars in the distant reaches of space, one as output and the other as input, both crossing inside the read-write innards of our Turing machines.

Hanging with Bucky Fuller (who wrote the original introduction), and cybernetic theorists such as Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana, Youngblood's new introduction situates Expanded Cinema in the heady West Coast context of the late '60s, in which scientists and counter-culture gurus alike had "brain[s] full of mescaline and logarithms" as they probed the mysteries of consciousness with increasingly sensitive machines and non-Western philosophies. With this new edition, Expanded Cinema's cultural location within "left" cybernetics is much clearer than when New York publisher Dutton printed that original cover, criss-crossed by video raster lines in an abstract play of color that slowly revealed itself as the phosphor tracings of a bird and a human (from Scott Bartlett's 1967 videotronic film Offon). Part of the use-value of Youngblood's compendium is its technological...