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For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the Guernsey-born, Gloucestershire-based poet Dom Sylvester Houedárd, concrete poetry came to entail a grammar of abstract visual forms, constructed from letters and diacritical marks, in which semantic meaning was largely subsumed. This quality is most virtuosically expressed in the so-called ‘typestracts’ which he created on his Olivetti typewriter. Houédard’s wordless poetics partly exemplifies the re-conceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada artform across the 1950s-70s, which often manifested itself through a movement away from language, and in attachments to the sixties counter-culture. But the unique distinction of Houédard’s work is its attempt to express a wordless or apophatic awareness of God, in which sense his concrete poetry is connected to his vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian. This chapter traces the development of these entwined impulses, moving from his beat-influenced verse of the 1940s-50s to his ‘kinetic’ concrete poetry of the mid-1960s, and finally to the typestracts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influences touched on along the way include Wittgenstein, auto-destructive art, and Tantric ritual.

The vegetation of Niwot Ridge has a rich history of study, beginning with phytosociological studies directly on the Ridge and in the surrounding mountains and incorporating more experimental and dynamic approaches in later years. This chapter provides an overview of the spatial patterns of Niwot Ridge plants and plant communities relative to the primary controlling environmental gradients at scales from the individual to the landscape. The spatial patterns of vegetation at all scales are dominated by physical forces, particularly the interaction of wind, snow, and topography. The controls of biotic factors on the distribution and abundance of plant species on Niwot Ridge have received considerably less attention than have physical factors, but recent studies have revealed the importance of competition and certain mutualisms in structuring community composition. Community research on Niwot Ridge has been organized around a hierarchy of spatial scales, from the plot to the region. Plot-based studies have focused on physiological and ecological dynamics of specific species and communities, and more spatially extensive studies have provided a hierarchical framework for the plot studies. In this chapter, we first present an overview of the broader patterns in the vegetation, followed by descriptions of the communities, and then the specifics of physical and biotic controls on species and plant growth that drive the community patterns. The landscape-scale patterns in the Niwot vegetation are driven by a complex elevation gradient, which is a combination of temperature and snow regime, with wind modifying and interacting with temperature and snow at all points along the gradient (chapter 2). Certainly the most critical boundary in the system is the upper tree limit, which defines the alpine system and which lies roughly between 3400 and 3600 m elevation on Niwot Ridge. Billings (1988) provided a climatic-floristic-physiographic review of major North American alpine systems that helps to place Niwot Ridge into a larger perspective. Climatically, Niwot is intermediate between the dry Sierras, which have greater precipitation but almost none of it falling during the summer, and the wetter northern Appalachians (Mt. Washington), which have fairly even annual precipitation and no drought.

Jack Benny was not only radio’s biggest star after the mid-1930s, but he was the most visible celebrity in Hollywood. This chapter examines the many ways that Benny’s radio program, and Benny’s performance career, intertwined radio and film, two powerful media industries that were often said to be at war with one another. While media conglomeration today means that performers and story ideas are moved freely across media, there were many impediments to do so in the past. Benny’s radio show was the first to parody popular movies, but he could not mention the radio stars who sold rival products. Benny’s radio-themed films made at Paramount between 1939 and 1941, met with significant box office success and even greater critical disparagement.

This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influence each other. In recent years, a vast amount of research has considered the impact of the media agenda on the parliamentary agenda (political agenda-setting) and how the size of this impact depends on a wide variety of contingent factors. Our empirical example uncovers considerable overlap in media agendas across various Western European countries, reflecting the importance of the international context in the construction of news.

This chapter uses the specificities of analogue video to argue that the genre has a double lineage that runs through music and art histories. The theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion and Yvonne Spielmann is used to situate early video art-music within the expansive multimedia culture of the 1960s. Contrasting the electromagnetic basis of the medium with the technologies of film and television, the issues of transmission, preservation and deliberation are used to demonstrate how the simultaneity of the video signal enabled image and sound to be produced, projected and manipulated at the same time. Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Robert Cahen, Tony Conrad and Bill Viola provide examples of musically-trained artists who embraced video as an audiovisual agent for transformation. With the experimental nature of these musicians in mind, video art-music is discussed as a form of visual noise-composition able to produce a form of live intermedia.

The members of the Art Ensemble belonged to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an African American community organization on Chicago’s South Side. Formed in 1965, the AACM was the most influential artists’ collective in jazz and experimental music, and the Art Ensemble was its flagship band, the first AACM group to tour the world and record for major labels. The Art Ensemble’s model of social relations, adapted from the AACM, made all of these accomplishments possible. Although AACM musicians composed and performed in many different styles, they were bound together by a shared commitment to support one another’s creative explorations. Drawing on the Association’s example, the members of the Art Ensemble established their own social model based on the practices of cooperation and personal autonomy. The Art Ensemble’s revolutionary musical practices were also rooted in the early discoveries of the Association. In the 1960s, AACM members devised new means of integrating improvisation and composition, hybrid modes of music-making not previously envisioned by jazz players or experimentalist composers. The Art Ensemble took AACM-style hybridity to a new level, developing a unique performance practice that combined group improvisation with intermedia and a large repertoire of written compositions.

Chapter 2 chronicles the early years of the Association for Creative Musicians (AACM). Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell joined the Association at its founding in 1965, enlisting in a nationwide movement of African American organizations working to achieve social change through the arts. By 1966, the preeminent bands in the AACM were Jarman’s quartet and Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, which featured Favors on bass and a new arrival from St. Louis, trumpeter Lester Bowie. The two groups were developing distinct yet compatible approaches to improvisation, composition, intermedia, and instrumentation (multi-instrumentalism, little instruments), and the members of the Art Ensemble started inviting Jarman to collaborate with them. He joined the Art Ensemble in 1969, just as the group was planning a voyage to Paris.

Chapter 4 examines A Jackson in Your House, the first of fifteen albums the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded in Europe. A Jackson in Your House brilliantly illustrates the band’s innovations in intermedia performance. On the album’s A-side, the musicians use verbal commentary and dramatic scenarios to address a number of political and cultural issues—notably the reception of black experimental music, including their own. However, on the B-side, they take a different approach, blending music with poetry and theater to create the kinds of vibrant soundscapes that Paris audiences found so compelling.

Chapter 8 addresses the Art Ensemble’s tenure at ECM Records, when the group achieved international renown and critical acclaim. By the 1980s, the band was touring more widely than ever, both abroad and at home. In the United States, the musicians’ mastery of intermedia allowed them to break into the performing-arts scene, while the success of their ECM albums earned them a prominent place in the jazz community, which was contending with the rise of a powerful traditionalist movement headed by Wynton Marsalis. This movement attracted many opponents, including the members of the Art Ensemble, who resisted traditionalism by proposing an alternative aesthetic, expressed in their evocative slogan “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”

Chapter 9 concentrates on Live from the Jazz Showcase, a video recording that captures all the sounds and sights of an Art Ensemble performance. In this concert, the band plays pieces inspired by the African diaspora, from Nigeria, Mali, and Morocco to New Orleans and New York. As the music unfolds, the group members’ onstage movements turn the performance into an immersive intermedia experience. Live from the Jazz Showcase is a ritual, a community celebration, and a captivating sonic and visual narrative about the meaning of Great Black Music.

This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.

This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.

Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing aesthetic territory and ideas usually associated with a different art form (e.g. performance or sculpture). Chapter 3 considers a variant of expanded cinema that integrates live performance into projection of moving images, usually called “projection performance” or “projector performance.” In this type of expanded work, the tactility of both filmstrip and projector are on display, as is the performer (typically the filmmaker—the representative of avant-garde cinema’s more intimate relationship between artist and audience). But alongside these markers of cinema’s physicality and presence is the ephemerality of live performance. Non-repeatable, site-specific, aleatory instead of mechanistically automatic, projection performance is centered upon the moment when the material of film is transformed into the far less tactile play of light, shadow, and illusion, and when objects give way to processes and experiences. The integration of performance into cinema was initially understood as a blurring of art forms. But the intermedia film-theater hybrids of the first wave of expanded cinema gave way to subsequent projection performances that claimed a performative dimension for cinema itself, rather than thinking of it as an alien form grafted onto film in a new intermedia format.