The Exploding Plastic Inevitable

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was organized by Andy Warhol. This piece included the artists, Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar, Danny Williams, The Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground played live while dancers, Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, Ingrid Superstar danced while images of Andy Warhol's movies were projected over them.

Lou Reed was not at the performance that was recorded on 16mm film by Robert Nameth

McLuhan describes the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, “with-in this all-encompassing, audiovisual environment, the flickering half-presence of television’s (then) low level of resolution was seen to create a “mosaic” that called forth the spectator’s “participatory” in-filling and a synaesthetic, multisensory response.  “The TV image... requires each instant that we ‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile.”

Ronald Nameth - Andy Warhols Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966).mov

This is a 16mm film that captures images of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

“The EPI represented the “auditory space” of electronic media, which as McLuhan explained, was multidirectional, synaesthetic, and interactive.” (Branden W. Joseph)

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable created a a small scale global village McLuhan describes in his book, The Medium is the Massage.  McLuhan describes the Exploding Plastic inevitable in “The Agenbite Outwit,” “Any pattern in which the components co-exist without direct lineal hook-up or connection, creating a field of simultaneous relations [which] is auditory, even though some aspects can be seen….They form a mosaic or corporate image whose parts are interpenetrating.  Such is also the kind of order that tends to exist in a city or a culture.  It is a kind of orchestral, reasonating unity.” McLuhan describes the creation of the global village in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable as the creation of an experience that all the participants and attendees unconsciously felt through the interdependence of the sounds, the light show, the projected images, and the performers.