Films
- Read MoreExperimental
A La Mode
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 10 minRental format: 16mm - Read More
Computer Generation
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color and b/w, sound, 29 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
What, Who, How
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 8 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
Astral Man
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 2 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Wheeeeels No. 1
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 5 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Wheeeeels No. 2
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 4 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
Achoo Mr. Keroochev
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 2 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
Dance of the Looney Spoons
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 5 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Mankinda
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 10 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Science Friction
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 9 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Blacks & Whites, Days & Nights
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Skullduggery
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 5 minRental formats: 16mm, 35mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Snapshots of the City
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Summit
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color and b/w, sound, 12 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Breathdeath
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 15 minRental formats: 16mm, 35mm, Digital file - Read MoreAnimation
A Dam Rib Bed
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, silent, 15 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Poem Field No. 1
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 4 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
The Human Face is a Monument
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 9.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
See, Saw, Seems
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 10 minRental formats: 16mm, 35mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Poem Field No. 2
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 6 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Panels for the Walls of the World
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 8 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Poem Field No. 5: Free Fall
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 7 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
Poem Field No. 7
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 4 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreDocumentaryExperimental
Vanderbeekiana
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color and b/w, sound, 29 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Film Form No. 1
Stan Vanderbeek16mm , color, sound, 10.42 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Oh
Stan Vanderbeek16mm , color, sound, 9.22 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreAnimationExperimental
Who Ho Ray No. 1
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, silent, 8 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Symmetricks
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, black and white, sound, 7 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Euclidean Illusions
Stan Vanderbeek16mm, color, sound, 9 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file
Biography
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 architect Buckminster Fuller, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce 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 and collage films, combined in a form of organic development.
VanDerBeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and dadaist collages of Max Ernst, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the Beat Generation. In the 1960s, VanDerBeek began working with the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, as well as representatives of modern dance, such as Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer. Building his Movie Drome theater at Stony Brook, New York, at just about the same time, he designed shows using multiple projectors. The Movie Drome was a grain silo dome which he turned into his ‘infinite projection screen’. Visitors entered the dome through a trap-door in the floor, and were encouraged after entering to spread out over the floor and lie with their feet pointing towards the centre. Once inside, the audience experienced a dynamic inter-dispersal of movies and images around them, created by over a dozen slide and film projectors filling the concave surface with a dense collage of moving imagery. 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 at Bell Labs, where dozens of computer animated films and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967 Vanderbeek created poem fields, a series of 8 computer-generated animations with Ken 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 the University of Maryland, Baltimore County visual arts program until his death.
Archive
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