Vanderbeek was at Black Mountain College, contemporary with the experimental composer John Cage, the architect-poet-inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller and the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. He experimented with immersive audio-visual environments, animation, computer-generated animation (with Ken Knowlton), he worked with the artist Claes Oldenburg and the the Happenings creator Al Hansen in the late 1950s and inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s domes, create his MovieDome at Stony Point New York in 1963.

“Over the last ten years, I have been working with a variety of media starting with painting and graphics, polarized light, constructions (heatpaintings, collages etc) developing an interest in motion pictures in 1957. I began work in animation, painting, stroke by stroke, animation: frame by frame, computers on and off, and bit by bit, the sequence is inevitable; motion pictures as graphics in motion. I looked on the computer as a challenge.” Stan Vanderbeek March 22nd 1969