This essay argued an expanded visuality in painting, film and live-art, and that 'the eye is the dominant organ of our age'. It included contemporary artists (e.g. Cerith Wyn Evans, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Holler, Pipilotti Rist) and historical figures such as Albers, Duchamp and Dali. Film and video formed a substantial part of the related exhibition. A L Rees' essay questions the mainly celebratory tone of the exhibition by looking at filmmakers who subvert the visuality of film in favour of more abstract concepts. He argued that current themes in gallery art, such as 'expanded cinema' and appropriation, are heralded in films of the 1970s. Rees begins with experimental film from the early cubists, and traces the origin of current 'dematerialization' back to El Lissitzky's installation art of the 1920s, itself influenced by his friendship with filmmakers like Viking Eggeling and Dziga Vertov. The essay argues that structural film contributed directly to gallery art, and to new digital media. The methodology of the essay was based on a comparative account of 'anti-retinal' tendencies in different art movements from the 1920s to the present day. The essay describes and illustrates the rise of a critical and expanded cinema in and beyond the gallery, within a historical framework that also connects these ideas to current strategies in viewing and spectatorship. Rees also aimed to introduce the readership to lesser-known aspects of the experimental cinema in the UK, Austria and the USA by discussing artists such as Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Lis Rhodes and Nicky Hamlyn. The essay was professionally edited and translated for dual-language editions with essays by four German critics, and with detailed artists' statements and illustrations (some of them light-sensitised). Over 60 artists were represented (along with separate film programmes to which Rees contributed).