Stan Vanderbeek Archive

Stan Vanderbeek Archive Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was an experimental filmmaker and intermedia pioneer.

Thank you The Brooklyn Rail Charles Duncan for the beautiful review of “Micro Kosmos” MAGENTA PLAINS !“Micro Kosmos is t...
06/24/2026

Thank you The Brooklyn Rail Charles Duncan for the beautiful review of “Micro Kosmos” MAGENTA PLAINS !

“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.”

-Charles Duncan

Now on view Stan VanDerBeek: Micro KosmosMay 7–June 20, 2026Level TwoMagenta Plains is pleased to present Micro Kosmos,...
05/08/2026

Now on view

Stan VanDerBeek: Micro Kosmos
May 7–June 20, 2026
Level Two

Magenta Plains is pleased to present Micro Kosmos, an exhibition organized around Stan VanDerBeek’s interrelated filmmaking and printmaking practice.

This select group of works focuses on VanDerBeek’s involvement with early computers as a new
means of generating imagery. In his engagements with the computer VanDerBeek saw a “future”
developing and changing at a rate so fast that he posited human intelligence may struggle to fully
grasp its consequences.

Through collaborations with Bell Labs engineer Ken Knowlton and others, he made a series of films entitled POEMFIELDS (1962-1971) that explored the increasing potential of such a complex machine during its nascent development.

Poemfield No. 1 (Blue version) (1967), is a 16mm silent film where powerful sequences of words emerge from mosaics of geometric forms, move around the frame, and eventually disperse. The graphics were produced through a pioneering computer animation language called BEFLIX (short for Bell Labs Flicks) that manipulated a pixel grid with eight shades of gray on an IBM 7090 computer.

The combination of text, image, movement, and color exemplifies the multilayered, moving image
experience for which VanDerBeek is best known.

Full press release on magentaplains.com

Images:

1. Stan VanDerBeek, Moveable Mandala, 1976, 9 Color silkscreens. Computer graphics from Poemfield series.

2. Stan VanDerBeek, Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version), 1967, 16mm film, color, silent, 4:41 mins. Realized with Ken Knowlton (Detail)

3. Excerpt from press release for VanDerBeek’s 1977 exhibition “Machine Art” presented at University Maryland Baltimore County

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