Stan VanDerBeek Archive

Magenta Plains is pleased to present Micro Kosmos, an exhibition organized around Stan VanDerBeek’s interrelated filmmaking and printmaking practices.

This select group of works focuses on VanDerBeek’s involvement with early computers as a new means of generating imagery. In his engagements with the computer VanDerBeek saw a “future” developing and changing at a rate so fast that he posited human intelligence may struggle to fully grasp its consequences. Through collaborations with Bell Labs engineer Ken Knowlton and others, he made a series of films entitled POEMFIELDS (1962-1971) that explored the increasing potential of such a complex machine during its nascent development.

Poemfield No. 1 (Blue version) (1967), is a 16mm silent film where powerful sequences of words emerge from mosaics of geometric forms, move around the frame, and eventually disperse. The graphics were produced through a pioneering computer animation language called BEFLIX (short for Bell Labs Flicks) that manipulated a pixel grid with eight shades of gray on an IBM 7090 computer. The combination of text, image, movement, and color exemplifies the multilayered, moving image experience for which VanDerBeek is best known.

VanDerBeek isolated single film frames from his computer animations translating the pixelated patterns via traditional printmaking processes such as color silkscreen and etching. This series of prints is presented for the first time since their display in the 1976 exhibition, Machine Art, at University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Two works titled Moveable Mandalas (1976), group nine color silkscreens arranged in a grid that take inspiration from the ancient diagrams of mandalas that were often transient in nature. In VanDerBeek’s work, these new “Intergraphics” sought to be iterative and interactive, centered around his belief that it was imperative to hold onto our humanity in an increasingly technologically driven world.

VanDerBeek wrote many texts that illuminate this precarious balance. The Technological Revolution was written over fifty years ago while he was in residence at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. It was selected by the Stan VanDerBeek Archive and is presented alongside this text to bring in the artist's voice and contextualize the exhibition. Its message retains a striking relevance to our current moment where generative artificial intelligence is informing a new understanding of creation and consciousness.