Stan VanDerBeek
«Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto»

Stan VanDerBeek, «Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto»,

It is imperative that we [the world’s artists] invent a new world language, that we invent a non-verbal international picture-language. I propose the following:
* The establishement of audio-visual research centers, preferably on an international scale. Thes centers to explore the existing audio-visual hardware. The development of new image-making devices (the storage and transfer of image materials, motion pictures, television, computers, videotape, etc.)
* The immediate research and development of image-events and performances in the Movie-Drom. I shall call these prototype presentations: Movie Murals, Ethos-Cinema, Newsreel of Dreams, Feedback, Image Libraries.
* When I talk of the movie-dromes as image libraries, it is understood that such life-theatres would use some of the coming techniques...and thus be real communication and storage centers, that is, by satellite, each dome could receive its image from a world wide library source, store them and program a feedback presentation to the local community that lived near the cneter, thsi newsreel feedback, could authentically review the total world image ‹reality› in an hour-long show.
* Intra-communitronics, or dialogues with other centers would be likely, and instand reference material via transmission television and telephone would be called for and received at 186,000 m.p.s., from anywhere in the world. Thus I call this presentation,a newsreel of ideas, of dreams, a movie-mural. An image library, a culture de-compression chamber, a culture inter-com.

Excerpt from Stan VanDerBeek, «Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto», Film Culture 40, 1966, pp. 15–18, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, The New American Cinema. A Critical Anthology, New York, 1967, pp. 173–179, quoted by Jürgen Claus in Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2003, p 229.