“Expanded cinema” encompasses film, video, performance, and multiple-projection. While video in museums has received considerable attention, experiments beyond the exhibition space have not. Here, leading scholars trace expanded and multiscreen cinema from its origins in early abstract film and the Bauhaus era to postwar happenings and live events in Europe and the United States, the first multimedia experiments of the 1960s, and the fusion of multiscreen art with sonic art and music from the 1970s onward. With new perspectives on American pioneers such as Carolee Schneemann and Stan Vanderbeek, this thought-provoking book goes on to explore the influence of video art on new media technologies.

Steven Ball, David Curtis, and Duncan White are research fellows at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. A. L. Rees is a research tutor in Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art.