This article provides a context for understanding the series of computer-animated films -- Poemfields -- that Vanderbeek made at Bell Labs between 1966 and 1969, using the first moving image programming language, Bflix, invented by Bell computer scientist, Ken Knowlton. Through an analysis of these works, the author shows how Vanderbeek's politics were deeply and consciously socialist in orientation, how he aimed at nothing less than changing social consciousness through a radical conception of the then emerging information and communication technologies, and how computerized animation as it was emerging at that moment was central to both of these aims.