All of the Poemfield films explore variations of poems, computer graphics, and in some cases combine live action images and animation collage; all are geometric and fast moving and in colour. As samples of the art of the future all the films explore variations of abstract geometric forms and words. In effect these works could be compared to the illuminated manuscripts of an earlier age. Now typography and design are created at speeds of 100.000 decisions per second, set in motion a step away from mental movies.

Stan Vanderbeek

In Poemfield #5 (1966-9) the poem spells out “free fall / falling / falling / falling / waiting/ waiting/ wit / witness/ man / into other wit/ other wit/ …while waiting for / while falling/ while falling free/ free fall…”

The computer generated text is animated over a background layer of film - shots of men skydiving. Vanderbeek says the piece is a metaphorical observation about the fall of man. It also plays with typographic capabilities - akin to Dada still montage imagery, here remediated through the capacities of the computer and optical printer.

Color was added during post-production. Knowlton explains that he was not involved with programming color in the films, “…the coloring (all in the case of computer-generated stuff) was arranged by Stan, in places and/or by persons such as Brown and Olvey. Bob Brown and Frank Olvey were well-known for color film techniques in 1968, and employed a three-strip color dye separation method, well known in film history, and by no means a informatic or new media color practice, but nonetheless a predecessor to the structure of color channel separations in software such as Photoshop.

Carolyn Kane