Jordan Belson had studied painting at Berkeley and was greatly influenced by the films of Fischinger, McLaren, and Richter, which he had seen at Frank Sauffacher’s Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Belson’s exquisitely constructed spacescapes, planetary forms, and mandalic structures in films such as Allures (1961) and Re-Entry (1964) reflected an abiding interest in exploring inner as well as outer spaces.

Belson helped establish the radical potential for collaborative media performance through the Vortex concerts. Held at the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco from May 1957 to January 1959, more than thirty-five concerts featured the ongoing collaboration between filmmaker Jordan Belson and sound artist Henry Jacobs. Jacobs arranged eclectic musical programs for the series, featuring compositions by the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Vladimir Ussachevsky as well as selections of Balinese and Afro-Cuban tunes, which would be pumped through thirty-eight loudspeakers arranged around the room. Belson, meanwhile, had command of up to thirty different projection devices, which he used in various combinations to place imagery on the planetarium’s sixty-five-foot dome.