| Gene Youngblood |
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Gene Youngblood (born May 30, 1942) is a theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His Expanded Cinema (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form,[1] was influential in establishing the field of media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly discipline.[2] He is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement, and has been teaching, writing and lecturing on media democracy and alternative cinemas since 1970.[3]
Mr. Youngblood has lectured at more than 400 colleges and universities throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and his writing is published extensively around the world. He has received research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, The New Mexico Arts Division, and the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities.[4]
In the 1960s, Mr. Youngblood was a journalist for newspapers, television, and radio in Los Angeles: reporter and film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; reporter for KHJ-TV, a Los Angeles television station; arts commentator for KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles; and from 1967 to 1970 he was co-editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest of the underground newspapers of that era.[4]
In 1970, Mr. Youngblood became a founding member of the Faculty of Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for eighteen years. He also taught at the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the film departments at UCLA and USC. In 1988, Mr. Youngblood joined the founding faculty of the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico (renamed Santa Fe University of Art and Design in 2010), where he taught until retiring in 2007. That same year Mr. Youngblood received an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for a major study of George Kuchar's video diaries, which was in progress at the time of this entry in the summer of 2010.[5]
Also in progress in 2010 were four other books by Mr. Youngblood: (1) Secession From the Broadcast, about the media democracy movement in America, (2) Emotional Bandwidth: The Telepresent World of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz -- A Visionary Legacy For the Internet, (3) a book of his collected articles from the Los Angeles Free Press, 1967–70, and (4) a book of memoirs.[5] He was also co-producing with filmmaker Bryan Konefsky a documentary on his life and work, titled Secession From the Broadcast: Gene Youngblood and the Communications Revolution (see trailer below).