Vanderbeek studied
art and
architecture at
Manhattan's
Cooper Union before transferring to
Black Mountain College in
North Carolina, where he met polymath
Buckminster Fuller, composer
John Cage, and choreographer
Merce Cunningham. Beginning in 1949, he took two terms of photography courses from
Hazel Larsen Archer at the institution. In the 1950s, he directed independent art films while learning animation techniques and painting scenery and set designs for
Winky Dink and You. His earliest films, made between 1955 and 1965, mostly consist of animated paintings and
collage films, combined in a form of organic development (including his 1959 short
Science Friction). Vanderbeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and
Dadaist collages of
Max Ernst, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the
Beat Generation. In the 1960s, Vanderbeek began working with
Claes Oldenburg and
Jim Dine, as well as representatives of modern dance and expanded cinema including
Merce Cunningham and
Elaine Summers. Contemporaneously, he designed shows using multiple projectors at his
Movie Drome theater at
Stony Point, New York. The
Movie Drome was a grain silo dome which he turned into his "infinite projection screen." In a letter to the
Rockefeller Foundation fielding support for the
Movie Drome, he wrote: "The most important concept of this ‘experience machine is to make the world audience ‘self’ conscious of itself, which I think is an essential step in the bringing about of peaceful co-existence." Visitors entered the dome through a trap-door in the floor, and were encouraged after entering to spread out over the floor and lie with their feet pointing towards the center. Once inside, the audience experienced a dynamic inter-dispersal of movies and images around them, created by over a dozen slide and film projectors filling the concave surface with a dense collage of moving imagery. These presentations contained a very great number of random image sequences and continuities, with the result that none of the performances were alike. His desire for the utopian led him to collaborate with
Ken Knowlton at
Bell Labs, where dozens of computer-animated films and
holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s. These included
Poem Field (1964-1968), a series of eight
computer animations. During the same period, he taught at many universities, researching new methods of representation, from the steam projections at the
Guggenheim Museum to the
interactive television transmissions of his
Violence Sonata, broadcast on several channels in 1970. He directed the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County visual arts program until his death. ==Family==