Stan VanDerBeek

American experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist (1927–1984), a pioneer of animation, expanded cinema, and early computer art.

VanDerBeek made collage films and immersive projection environments, working at the frontier where cinema, technology, and communication met — an evangelist for art as a global communication medium.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. VanDerBeek built the Movie-Drome, a geodesic dome fitted out as an immersive theater in which films and images were projected across the whole interior surface — a direct appropriation of R. Buckminster Fuller's dome as an artistic and communicative medium. Conceived as a prototype for a worldwide network of image-exchange "culture-intercoms," the Movie-Drome shared Fuller's planetary, technology-for-humanity ambition. VanDerBeek is thus a contemporary who took Fuller's structural invention as raw material for his own art, appearing in the corpus's survey of Fuller's reach into the art world.

See Also

• We Are All Astronauts — catalog of Fuller's influence across the twentieth-century art world
• John Cage — fellow figure of the expanded-media avant-garde

Sources

• We Are All Astronauts (source reference) — situates VanDerBeek's dome-based work in Fuller's art-world reach