presented in association with the San Francisco Art Institute
Gene Youngblood In Person
[this event is free]

Gene Youngblood is an internationally known 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, was seminal in establishing media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly discipline. He has been teaching, writing, curating and lecturing on media democracy and alternative cinemas since 1970 and is widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement. Secession from the Broadcast is a two-part lecture presented as a collaboration between Cinematheque and the San Francisco Art Institute.

There exists in America today an alternative media environment that surpasses the wildest utopian dreams of twentieth-century media activism. It presents the possibility of the communication revolution that is essential if we are to create on the same scale as we can destroy. It enables the ultimate act of civil disobedience: leaving the culture without leaving the country. It holds the possibility of radical resocialization on an international scale and is a mortal threat to social control as we know it. This lecture is about what is at stake in the epic struggle for control of the Internet, and what we must do to release its revolutionary potential. (Gene Youngblood)