Revisioning the significance of Stan VanDerBeek is beset with a number of historiographical problems that tell us a great deal about history-making in technological times. Why, and more importantly, how, does a key experimental filmmaker breaking radical ground in animation and a technoart innovator of the American avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s fall into complete obscurity? The author argues that a very similar process is taking place around the reductive term digital media', the shift in technocultural production and consumption that rendered all filmic consciousness as animation.