Stan Vanderbeek's Poemfield series was produced between 1964 and 1970 using one of the first computer animation languages, Ken Knowlton's BEFLIX (short for Bell Labs Flicks). Each individual film is concerned with the appearance of language on a computer screen: sequences of words gradually emerge from, and back into, kinetic mosaics of glittering geometric graphics. In Poemfield No. 2, "these words shift and mutate, fracture and fragment, to travel down the screen in a laconic calligraphy. The viewer reads them, but it is impossible not to see them as well: they remain shapes, images, pictures. The color is psychedelic. The underscoring technology, computational. The presentation is cinematic. Yet the artist presents the work as, simply, a poem." (Zabet Patterson)