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This chapter describes the expansion of cinema's preexisting modalities and dimensions. Cinema's expansion is best described as the rearrangement of a single, original narrative in order to form derivative narratives, with the use of new modes of production and consumption. A series of filmmakers, video artists, and scholars with the likes of Gene Youngblood investigated the phenomenon of cinematic expansion. Youngblood argues that cinematographic experience has intensified due to new technologies that greatly involved human senses. This experience has later on bred more fans, aficionados, or supporters, whose blogs and forums became means for responses. These responses spurred the accumulation of discourses that form part of the cinema. These discourses then structure adaptations, remakes, sequels, prequels, and so forth—all deriving from their respective original narratives.

Since meeting in 1975, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz focused their collaborative art work on developing new and alternative structures for video as an interactive communication form and on interactive new media and community-centered social media. With participation by media art and politics theorist Gene Youngblood, this historic conversation follows the work of Galloway and Rabinowitz, beginning with their meeting in Paris and including Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole-In-Space (1980), and the birth of the Electronic Café during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

Since the mid-‘90s, contemporary art practice and criticism has been engaged in a widespread reformulation of the concept of “site-specificity.” At the same time, the vast proliferation of artists’ film and video installation has given rise to an anxiety over the proper material, institutional, and discursive location of these works as they abjure the traditional conditions of the art gallery’s white cube or the film theatre’s black box. The introduction endeavors to bring these two apparently disparate threads together by recalling their historical conjunction within a theory and practice of 1960s Expanded Cinema.

This introduction offers readers a series of key concepts that run the gamut of this book. These include “documentary’s expanded fields,” which are inspired by the writings of Gene Youngblood and Rosalind E. Krauss, and the “twenty-first-century documentary,” an array of the nonstandardized documentary practices and artifacts that emerged during this period thanks to the digital technologies for production and postproduction of images and the nontheatrical experiential platforms, such as VR interfaces, the gallery, video-sharing services, and interactive websites. While contextualizing these nascent practices and artifacts within the sociocultural crises and the technological changes of the twenty-first century, the introduction also identifies five domains of the conventional documentary film that they refashion and transform, namely, “image,” “vision,” “dispositif,” “archive,” and “activism.”