BLACK GADGET

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) was seminal in establishing the field of media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly discipline. He is known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement, and has been teaching, writing, curating and lecturing on media democracy and alternative cinemas since 1970.

Mr. Youngblood has lectured at more than four hundred colleges and universities, and his writing is published extensively around the world.  He has received research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, The New Mexico Arts Division, and the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities.

In the 1960s 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, and arts commentator for KPFK Pacifica Radio. From 1967 to 1970, he was associate editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest of the underground newspapers of that era.

In 1970 he became a founding member of the Faculty of Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for nineteen years. He has 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 he joined the founding faculty of the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, where he taught until retiring in 2007…

And so it goes without saying that bL4ck_g4d3t is extremely honored to bring you an exclusive, original  essay by Mr. Youngblood, which serves as a primer of sorts to his forthcoming book, Secession From the Broadcast.

The topic of radical change is relevant in light of recent events, but what follows is a prescription for positive radical change rather than the kind of destructive, negative thinking that insists that “violence is the only answer” to the crises facing all societies today. Crashing strong ideas together can be a much more powerful act than crashing a plane into a building.