Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence,  Between the Black Box and the White Cube  travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art.   Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations,  Between the Black Box and the White Cube  is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art. In the closing pages of his fine book Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, Andrew V. Uroskie delivers a vivid explication of Ken Dewey's multimedia project Selma Last Year (1966). With this work, Dewey proposes to redefine the social character of media through sophisticated interrelations of technology and live performance contingent to a viewer's presence... The constitutive force of the work is generated in a split attention, a psychophysical tension between the process of recognizing one's own familiar image and the urgent, existential stakes of enfranchisement exemplified in the brutal crackdown of state power against its citizens. The process of coming into a field of representation--as a subject and as a participant in the American political process--was manifested through the capabilities of moving-image technology. Dewey's work presents media as a problem of civil rights... The care and nuance Uroskie devotes to Dewey's work is characteristic of case studies presented throughout Between the Black Box and the White Cube. In taking as his object the idea of cinema inpostwar art, Uroskie offers a model for future scholarship on the complex, multifarious activity collectedunder the term "expanded cinema." His achievement rests in part on his lucid discussion of the etymologyof "expanded" in a broader context of postwar art... As Uroskie shows, expanded cinema projects of the mid-1960s, most often associated with multiscreenprojection, were a culmination of rich and long-developing experimentation with the locational characterof cinema. The idea of expanded cinema was defined by "consciousness of the paradoxical site specificityof cinema practice" (11). Rejuvenation of the avant-garde demanded reinvention of institutionalconditions. Awareness of this necessity arose from protocols of production, exhibition, and spectatorship,exemplified by the studio system of Hollywood. Artists' consideration of cinema meant contending withthese protocols, as an examination of cinema's ontology was fraught by this massive, determininginfrastructure. "Rather than asking how film was articulated as an artistic medium, we need to ask insteadhow the very idea of 'medium' was being transformed by the essentially hybrid and diffuse nature of themoving image" (12). Uroskie posits "not what is cinema?" in André Bazin's fundamental question of filmstudies, but "where?" (12; emphasis in original) The idea of cinema is inextricable from its contingent sites... Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a vital contribution to growing research on theinterdisciplinary character of art in the postwar period. In addition to its value for an art-historical regardof the moving image, Uroskie's study should be read in a wider spectrum of current disciplinary turns infilm and media studies, media archaeology, cultural techniques, and discourses of "post-cinema" at large,along with a renewed focus on animation, environments, sound, and color... "Rhetorics of expansion," in theirmid-1960s iteration examined by Uroskie, may be seen in a generative context of other aspirations forcapacious vision systems and spatial projection. In this way, Between the Black Box and the WhiteCube offers case studies toward a history of what Harun Farocki calls the "operational image": an image notfor contemplation but rather a set of instructions. For these complex conditions, the moving image may be"homeless," as Uroskie concludes, yet in him it has found a thoughtful, rigorous historian. - Kenneth Wh