Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

Pg. 133

Personal cinema becomes art when it moves beyond self-expression to encompass life-expression. Art is not created; it is lived. The artist merely reports it. Synaesthetic cinema is not filmed so much as experienced onto film or videotape. As an extension of the citizen's nervous system it can't be judged by the same canons that traditionally have represented art. It's simply the first utterance of human beings who've found a new language. If art is involved, it's the art of creative living as opposed to passive conditioned response.

 

For ten thousand years more than five hundred generations of agricultural men have lived abnormal, artificial lives of repetitive, boring toil as energy slaves who must prove their right to live. But now we are on the threshold of freedom. We are about to become our own gods. We are about to face the problem of values. Bronowski: "The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, there are no values, until men want to do both."