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Stan VanDerBeek's Movie-Drome: A Backyard Dome in Stony Point Built to Network the World

In his backyard in Stony Point, New York, Stan VanDerBeek built an aluminum dome where visitors lay on the floor under a storm of films and slides. He imagined a worldwide network of them, linked by satellite.

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In the early 1960s, Stan VanDerBeek lived at the Gate Hill Cooperative in Stony Point, New York, alongside John Cage, David Tudor, M.C. Richards and others who had come from Black Mountain College. He was already known in New York's experimental film scene, and since 1957 he had been making film sequences for a theater that did not exist yet. In 1963, with a Rockefeller grant for "studies in non-verbal communication," he began to build it in his backyard.

He called it the Movie-Drome. It took its cue from Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, but it was built far more roughly: modeled on the top of a grain silo, pieced together from mail-ordered aluminum wedges joined with bolts and sealant, and raised about 6 feet off the ground on wooden pylons set in cement. Visitors climbed in through a trap door in the center, lay on the floor with their heads toward the wall, and looked up into a mosaic of films and slides projected across the whole interior at once. VanDerBeek finished the prototype in the fall of 1965, after presenting his multimedia work at the Vision '65 conference.

The dome was meant to be the first of many. In his manifesto Culture: Intercom, VanDerBeek imagined Movie-Dromes around the world, linked by satellite and exchanging streams of images as a kind of non-verbal language. "The audience takes what it can or wants from the presentation and makes its own conclusions," he wrote. He saw urgency in the idea, pointing to an estimated 700 million people in the world who could not read.

The network never came, but the dome outlived the proposal. The Museum of Modern Art now holds Movie-Drome, dated 1964 to 1965, as a dome theater of 16mm films and 35mm slides transferred to high definition video, and rebuilt it for Signals: How Video Transformed the World in 2023. Lying on that floor, decades before the browser, visitors were already sorting through more images than anyone could watch at once.

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