Stan VanDerBeek

Stan VanDerBeek was born in 1927 in New York. He studied visual art at The Cooper Union before attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he worked under poet M.C. Richards and composer John Cage. He began as a painter but quickly found his way into animated collage film, using cuttings from newspapers and magazines layered over painted surfaces. His early experiments already suggested a lifelong interest in assembling fragments into a larger visual language, a concern that extended beyond the studio into the possibilities of communication itself. Over the years VanDerBeek pursued an unusual path that moved between art, research, and education. He held artist-in-residence positions at laboratories and universities, investigating new technologies, and later taught as a professor of art and film at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from 1975 until his death. In parallel with his artistic work he wrote essays, scripts, and manifestos that imagined new architectures for information, and in doing so aligned himself as much with scientists, inventors, and educators as with artists.

From the late 1950s through the 1960s he became known for experimental films that combined collage, animation, and found footage into fast-moving, layered sequences. These works reflected the speed and overload of media culture, while also borrowing from the chance operations and simultaneity he absorbed from his mentors at Black Mountain. By 1964–65 he had conceived the Movie-Drome, a dome-shaped theater built from a repurposed silo in Stony Point, New York, where numerous films and multiple slide programs could be projected simultaneously in a very intense audio-visual environment. For VanDerBeek, the Movie-Drome was a visionary experiment in international image exchange, conceived as a global communications network that anticipated the logic of the internet. 

This desire to invent new visual languages carried him into the emerging field of computer graphics. Beginning in 1964 he collaborated with computer scientist Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs, using the IBM 7094 computer and Knowlton’s BEFLIX programming language to produce the Poemfield films. Across eight works completed between 1966 and 1971, VanDerBeek combined his own poetry with digitally generated text and graphics, producing what he described as an image-based poetry language. In Poemfield no. 7, the phrase “THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE; PEACE IS THE WAY; NO MORE WAR” was layered with John Cage’s Amores composition, bringing political urgency into dialogue with experimental form. Later, during his residency at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he developed Symmetricks, 1972, exploring pulsating symmetrical line drawings like cinematic Rorschach tests. At the same time, he extended his experiments with communication technologies into large-scale projects such as Panels for the Walls of the World, 1970, in which he used Xerox Telecopier machines to transmit collages of headlines, political images and advertisements to public sites across multiple cities. Conceived as “telephone murals,” these fax-based transmissions embodied his conviction that art could function as a form of international public dialogue. Whether through collage, film, code or telecommunications, VanDerBeek treated media as a notational system, a way of writing pictures and manipulating language to reflect a culture saturated by images. 

Over the course of his career VanDerBeek received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, along with the Independent Filmmaker Award from the American Film Institute. His work reached an international stage through landmark exhibitions including Cybernetic Serendipity in London and Washington, The Projected Image in Boston and Software in New York. His films and installations have continued to be revisited in major surveys such as The Culture Intercom at MIT and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Poemfield at Andrea Rosen Gallery and DOCUMENT, Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum, Delirious at the Met Breuer, Thinking Machines at the Museum of Modern Art and Signals: How Video Transformed the World at MoMA. His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Anthology Film Archives and Los Angeles Filmforum; among many other venues. Today it is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, Reina Sofia, LACMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. VanDerBeek’s legacy is that of an artist who saw film, computers and media systems as instruments for creating new art forms and as frameworks for building cultural infrastructures of thought and communication. He passed away in 1984.