The Brooklyn Rail

Micro Kosmos is the third exhibition at Magenta Plains to draw from the fascinating Stan VanDerBeek Archive. This vest-pocket presentation concentrates on the artist’s film/digital/computer-based work from the sixties and seventies, offering six ostensibly traditional examples of printmaking alongside a moving image presentation titled Poemfield No. 1 (Blue version) (1967), both supported by the text The Technological Revolution. Compact in scope, the richness of this exhibition is manifold: deep looking yields exponential layers of aesthetic reward; we are invited to bear witness retroactively to the exceedingly rare phenomenon of an art medium at its genesis. For viewers in 2026, Micro Kosmos strips away the overamplified embellishments of today’s practical, cultural, and psychic digital universe to reveal the simplified elegance of the protean matter of the computer revolution and its early impact upon the visual arts.

A Renaissance man, VanDerBeek (b. 1927; d. 1984) was a prolific multimedia artist widely recognized for his pioneering work in experimental film, expanding cinema and computer art. Yet, his work in painting and drawing, as well as his engagement with poetry, cannot be parsed from how he embraced emerging technologies. Equally a McLuhan-era social philosopher, VanDerBeek, in 1969, wrote the free-verse poem The Technological Revolution while in residence at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, presaging the existential hand-wringing endemic within today’s rush toward generative AI:

. . . the technique of man
begets man
man is a tool
making/breaking
the man/machine . . .

artificial
intelligence
meta
phors
for
real
intelligence
by
men
women
and
machines…

One should especially note the weight of his term “tool” during this watershed moment. “Access to tools” was the tagline of The Last Whole Earth Catalog—the DIYer’s tech-slanted bible published in 1971. Speaking in a 1972 video documentary by John Musilli, VanDerBeek even displayed a hammer as an analog to the computer. Armed with the cutting-edge technology of the late sixties, VanDerBeek engaged the untapped visual possibilities of computers as a new and enticing aesthetic nail—a profound digital gateway into a cultural and spiritual frontier.

Micro Kosmos features one moving-image work, Poemfield No. 1 (Blue version) (1967), that runs just under five minutes. Here, the text of VanDerBeek’s poem of the same name unfolds temporally through white graphics that blink, pulsate, meander, and eventually dissolve into abstracted stair-stepped arrays of gridded pixels that draw the text into and out of recognition. The rudimentary white text on a blue screen associatively locates this work within the earliest genealogy of computer graphics bound by the hardware limitations of CRT monitors. However, we learn that Poemfield No. 1 owes equally to analog artistry—physical punch cards were used to program imagery, 16mm film to preserve and re-present it, colorization was applied later—and what we encounter, in fact, predates an exclusively electronic methodology. Seen through an historical lens, Poemfield No. 1 is as groundbreaking as Wendy Carlos’s contemporaneous Moog synthesizer tour-de-force Switched-on Bach (1968) and the Howard Wise Gallery’s exhibition TV as a Creative Medium (1969) that launched video within a fine-art context.