Jeffrey Skoller – “Moviedrome: the Island on the Edge of Forever”

Moviedrome: the Island on the Edge of Forever as imagined by Jeffrey Skoller, One of fifteen islands fabricated by Greg Sholette based on ideas proposed by invited collaborators, Mixed media (paper, sand, plastic, wire, resin), 2012

Dear Greg,

“Moviedrome: the Island on the Edge of Forever,” is an homage to two visionary artists of the mid-20th century, the media artist Stan Van der Beek and science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. The island is a giant floating Fuller-esque Geodesic Dome whose interior is a 360′ projection screen. It is based upon the filmmaker Vanderbeek’s visionary project Moviedrome from the 1960′s which was a dome theatre, people entered and were literally surrounded by a giant moving image collage made up of every kind of image and sound imaginable from around the world. It was a prototype for what new media people now call immersive digital environments. It was a utopian project that imagined we could create a “worldpicture” based on a democratic appropriation of images from across the world that anybody could put up. It was an analogue and embodied pre-figuration of the Internet, YouTube and social media as a place where one could become part of the “world-picture” both as producer and spectator. As per Ellison’s Star-trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” there was a planet where the entire history of the Earth was a giant film loop and could be seen projected onto a movie screen running in fast motion. If you jumped into the screen, you would enter earth’s history at the point you went in and your presence in that moment in time altered the course of earth’s history. But whereas Ellison’s narrative was decidedly tragic and dystopian, the people who visit Van der Beek’s Moviedrome on the Island at the Edge of Forever are able to enter earth’s history at any point bringing with them the knowledge of the 3 catastrophic present. Their altering presence transforms the past in ways that no longer make the present inevitable. It is from within the Moviedrome on the Island at the Edge of Forever that people are able to not only transform their own lives, but also that of the world. The island becomes a kind of allegory for the most utopian aspirations of the dead art of cinema–the belief that cinema could fix the world through the manipulation of space and time, creating a new world picture of human aspiration and possibility.

-Jeffrey Skoller

Jeffrey Skoller is a filmmaker and film scholar who writes frequently on experimental art.

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