SOCKS

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

  • Media
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Culture
  • Sounds
  • Territories
  • Visual Atlas

The fine art of goofing off by Henry Jacobs

December 28, 2010 by Fosco Lucarelli Leave a Comment

In 1972 television and audio pioneer Henry Jacobs, among whose works you can file the invention of surround sound (Vortex: Experiments in Sound and Light) and the improvised soundtrack material and background dialogue to George Lucas’ 1971 sci-fi masterwork THX 1138, joined Bob McClay and Chris Koch to create a half-hour series of television programming called The Fine Art of Goofing Off, or the “Sesame Street’s psychedelic, philosophical cousin.”

With few if any creative limits, this unique series celebrated leisure, pointless activity, philosophical weirdness, richly layered imagery and hypnotic, non-matching sources. No doubt he befriended the best minds of his generations, among whom: Allen Ginsberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ken Nordine, Lenny Bruce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Each program would develop an open-ended theme, like “time” or “work” in an unpredictable collage of brief episodes in a variety of different styles of animation: stop-action photography, claymation, collage, cut-outs, and continuous drawing.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fine art of Goofing Off.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5AvTQnKnF8

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIE0k663xNg

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNQ–ZWOrkQ

The image above and the video below belong to the Cinefamily 2010 Henry Jacobs retrospective.

Further reads:
The wide weird world of Henry Jacobs.
on Evilmonito.
on Dublab.
Cinefamily events

Related Posts

  • ?

    Don't know, just found it. It looks like a scene from "Network" Try to call…

  • Motoi Yamamoto

    Motoi Yamamoto works with salt.  

  • The New Landscape in Art and Science by György Kepes

    The New Landscape in Art and Science is a 1956 book by György Kepes. The…

  • Francesco Franchi

    The best italian information graphic designer, period. More info (in italian) here.

  • Ordinary Unordinary

    An ordinary christmas day for Bjork who talks and gets off her own CRT tv…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr

Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

About | Visual Atlas | Topics

We are Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli from Microcities. Ask us anything

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr


SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Whenever possible we try to attribute content (images, videos, and quotes) to their creators and original sources. Please feel free to write us if you notice misattributions or wish something to be removed.
SOCKS is powered by WordPress.