<nettime> RIP Gene Youngblood (1942-2021)

[nettime's_expanding eulogist <nettime@kein.org>]

< https://www.artforum.com/news/gene-youngblood-1942-2021-85439 >

April 07, 2021 at 4:14pm

GENE YOUNGBLOOD (1942-2021)

Visionary media arts theorist and critic Gene Youngblood,
whose prescient 1970 book Expanded Cinema reshaped the
fields of art and communications, predicted technological
advances in filmmaking, and offered the first serious
recognition of video and software-based works as cinematic
art forms, died on April 6 in Santa Fe at the age of
seventy-eight.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1942, Youngblood spent
most of the 1960s in Los Angeles variously working as a
reporter and film critic for the Los Angeles
Herald-Examiner, as a reporter for KHJ-TV, and as an arts
commentator for KPFK. In 1967, he was hired at $80 a week as
associate editor at the Los Angeles Free Press, the first
and most influential countercultural organ of its time.

He would remain at the publication until 1970, when he began
co-teaching at California Institute of the Arts, with video
artist Nam June Paik, one of the first college courses on
the history of video. That summer, his "Call to Arms" was
published in the inaugural issue of the crucial journal
Radical Software. The piece manifested Youngblood's unending
drive to democratize the media, announcing, "The media must
be liberated, must be removed from private ownership and
commercial sponsorship, must be placed in the service of all
humanity."

A few months later, Youngblood published Expanded Cinema,
much of which was based on his columns for the LA Free
Press. Though the volume took as its title a term coined by
Stan VanDerBeek, "it was Gene Youngblood who put it on the
cover of a book, filled it with rocket fuel, and sent it
buzzing through the late-1960s art world like a heat-seeking
missile," wrote Caroline A. Jones in Artforum in 2020, on
the occasion of the book's fiftieth anniversary. Expanded
Cinema -- in which Youngblood limned concepts ranging from the
Paleocybernetic Age to the videosphere to "new nostalgia,"
all in context of what he termed the "global intermedia
network" -- is considered a seminal work in the field of
communications. "I thought maybe four hippies would read
it," Youngblood wrote decades later. The book sold nearly
fifty thousand copies in seven years.

Youngblood lectured on media arts theory at more than four
hundred higher-learning institutions. In 1988, he founded
the moving image arts department at the College of Santa Fe,
where he remained a professor for years (the institution,
which in 2010 was rechristened the Santa Fe University of
Art and Design, closed in 2018). Though the rise of the
internet hardly led to the utopian mediascape Youngblood had
hoped for -- "The architecture of tyranny is in place," he
wrote in 2013; "truth-telling and dissent are
criminalized" -- he continued to advocate for a counterculture
media characterized by radical democracy. "Anything less,"
he wrote, "is a betrayal of us all."

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