Remembering Chicago Video Artist, Arturo Cubacub

Influential video artist, director, and editor Arturo Cubacub passed away on December 28. The award-winning filmmaker was the president of I-Cubed Productions and was an innovator for new technologies and techniques in filmmaking.

After graduating with an M.F.A. in Electronic Visualization from the University of Illinois, Cubacub was an instructor at The Chicago Editing Center. From there, Cubacub worked at various editing houses, working in graphics, post production, and effects editing. Cubacub then moved into directing, creating works such as his award-winning music video, S T R E T C H.

On top of his work in film, he wrote the i^3 Manifesto, the Hyper-Cinema Manifesto and was painter, musician, and aerobatic pilot. 

Media Burn has one of his pieces in the archive from an episode of Image Union:

Cubacub’s “Between Dots” was shown on an episode of Image Union in 1981. This video, as described by Cubacub, is “an abstract dance around unity and duality.” Arturo was always on the cutting edge of electronic visualization even when the technology was the first Bally computers in 1981, as in “Between Dots.”

On his website, Cubacub said:

“I was playing with the idea of taking the visual branch of the concrete poetry movement further by stripping the poem of its words and letters and not just of its syntax. The concrete poet’s aim is to work outside the syntax and grammar of language and deal instead either with the individual word or with words not related to grammar. The assumption is that syntax merely communicates a ‘public’ view of the world, and the aim is to achieve a ‘private’ view of things.”