From its exterior, the industrial metal dome nestled in the woods outside Stony Point, New York, could be anything: perhaps someone is doing horticulture experiments, or maybe it’s secretly a yurt. Stepping inside would reveal a different surprise: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, an “experience machine” complete with both film and slide projectors blanketing the curved ceiling of the immersive, exuberant space with an array of color and black-and-white imagery. However, it was neither the dome or the content on its ceiling that made Movie-Drome an important development in 20th-century art – it was its unrealized connection to a global network of satellites that would beam data into Movie-Dromes around the world. As historian Felicity D Scott writes, it was “an expansion of the public sphere and tool of subjective modernization – part of a global development apparatus”.
The project was never realized in its totality, due to technological constraints of the 1960s, but fast forward to 2023 and we can see that this global network of information – delivered through interactive screens – has now taken over how we experience the world. These connections are the focus of a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Titled Signals: How Video Transformed the World, the show examines the history of broadcast media not as simply experiments in film-making, but as a transformational media network – especially in the realm of social and political critique.
