About this Event
“Bridge to an Unseen Shore”: New Age Audiovision (Various Filmmakers, 1977-1983, 16mm and digital projection, approx 60 min)
In his new book, Bridge to an Unseen Shore: New Age Music as Visionary Art (UC Press 2026), Jacob Smith offers the first sustained exploration of the music and visual culture of the New Age movement of the 1970s and 1980s. “The visionary school of New Age music created sonic bridges to an unseen shore,” Smith writes, “carrying listeners to dreamlike inner landscapes, forging sonic pathways to realms of cosmic awareness, and establishing modes of listening meant to integrate mind and body.” Across its six chapters, Bridge to an Unseen Shore examines a “multimedia school of visionary art” pioneered by ingenious electronic musicians like Iasos, Kat Epple, and Michael Stearns; visual artists like Ken Jenkins and Jeanette Stobie; and filmmakers like Dorothy Fadiman and Jordan Belson. These artists shared a synaesthetic approach to artistic creation, as well as a utopian aspiration that speaks vitally to the uncertainty of the present day.
For this program, Block Cinema welcomes Jacob Smith, Associate Chair and Professor in the Radio/TV/Film department at Northwestern, for a curated selection of rare and restored films. Smith will introduce the “unifying aesthetic of crystalline, gemlike light that is characteristic of the visionary experience” shared between filmmakers Jordan Belson and Dorothy Fadiman and the New Age composers, such as Georgia Kelly, Iasos, and Geoffrey Chandler, who scored their films. The program will include three recently-restored works by Belson, an alchemist of abstract cinema and widely-acknowledged master of “visual music,” as well as two archivally-sourced 16mm films by Fadiman, whose work Smith describes as “the crystallization of New Age audiovision in terms of both form and content.”
Films Screened:
RADIANCE: THE EXPERIENCE OF LIGHT (Dorothy Fadiman, 1978, 22 min, 16mm courtesy of Visual Studies Workshop)
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES (Jordan Belson, 1977, 10 min, 16mm courtesy of the Jordan Belson Estate)
INFINITY (Jordan Belson, 1980, 9 min, 16mm courtesy of the Jordan Belson Estate)
CELEBRATION: I AM ALL OF THESE (Dorothy Fadiman, 1983, 9 min, 16mm courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
APOLLO’S LYRE (Jordan Belson, 1980, 10 min, 16mm to digital transfer courtesy of the Jordan Belson Estate)
Total runtime: approx. 60 min
Jacob Smith is cofounder of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University, and professor there in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. Jacob Smith is the author of Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press 2008); Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (University of California Press 2011); The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance (University of California Press 2012); Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015); and two experimental audiobooks: ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene (University of Michigan Press 2019) and Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves (University of Michigan Press, 2021).
His most recent publication is Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
Event venue & nearby stays
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
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