Chris Hill
January 23, 2024
Interview on zoom, with Arnold Dreyblatt in Berlin and Chris Hill in Buffalo

Both Arnold Dreyblatt and Chris Hill were students of Steina and Woody Vašulka at the Center for Media Study during the years the Vašulkas taught (1973-81) in that pioneering SUNY Buffalo media arts program. In recent decades, Dreyblatt and Hill have both produced bodies of work that engage memory and archiving practices. In her response to a recent invitation to produce a “pathway” for an exhibition at the Vašulka Kitchen Archive, House of Art, Brno (2023), Hill foregrounded the Vašulkas’ decades-long commitment to the transmission of cultural knowledge, and connected with Dreyblatt, who had performed at the opening of “Sums & Differences,” a sister exhibition at the House of Art featuring work by the Vašulkas, to further explore their respective experiences with Steina and Woody’s archiving impulse and diverse projects.  About the period of the late 1960s-early 1970s when the Vašulkas began their seminal investigations into the materiality of the electronic signal, Woody remarked: “There was almost a religion about disseminating information...it was an activist period. Everyone was trying to disclose the utmost secrets of systems, systems thinking and performance” (1992 interview). Dreyblatt and Hill’s 2024 discussion revisits personal histories that inform their understandings of the Vašulkas’ commitment to preserving cultural synapses and sharing cultural knowledge.

CH: We should probably talk about how we want to focus this interview and what we want to do with this interview, and also note that we have not spoken with each other for many years. As I was working on my project for the Vašulka Kitchen Archive in Brno [A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape, 2023], it seemed very clear that archiving in its various forms, which included the Vašulkas’ curatorial projects, was something that they were very committed to and had been for a long time.

And then in the interview that I did with Woody in the 1990s, he referred in a couple of different ways to being from a socialist country [Czechoslovakia] and having been brought up with this respect for knowledge.

AD: Right.

CH: And that it was their “destiny” to basically do this kind of work. And of course, he was looking back from the 1990s, but it did seem like this was something he was very conscious of, and it was important to him and to Steina as well.

And then in our recent email, you and I both touched upon this, and it seemed like your connection with them is important because you were their student, but also because of your own work dealing with archives and memory. There's a number of different ways to go at this, but it also seems because you were an early student maybe, or certainly you were there at day one, you have a particular perspective on them during that period, and it would be interesting to know just anything that you wanted to put on the record or share about that.

AD: Right. At least Steina always said that I was her first student, which I certainly wasn't aware of back then.

CH: And what we talk about today doesn't have to be on the record at all.

AD: Right. You're definitely onto an important topic, archiving, because I think from the very beginning, they saw themselves as part of a community, a movement, a wave. And because they were Europeans, I think even from the beginning, they looked back. It's one thing to be at our ages and start to look back at what we've done and what others have done, but my memory of them is they were wanting to carry this forward, they were looking historically, even when the history was, at that time from our perspective now, quite short.

So that's one thing. Also I always thought there's an interesting aspect in their different personalities and roles and their ways of looking at the world which complemented each other. But clearly Woody wanted to rationalize it all somehow. From the beginning he wanted to codify it, as if there are some laws in video that he was going to somehow codify or just get put down.

So he questioned "what is it? And how did it begin? And what are its possible predecessors?" - because it was this new medium. In some ways, you could say he was prepared for it. As you know, he had some electronics background, he was a tinkerer, and he also had a music background (jazz). But also, of course his film background, etc. I mean, he was definitely this guy that could take things apart with his hands and analyze it. But there was also a sense of discovery as a new beginning. They felt that not only did they discover aspects of this medium that they were unprepared for, but somehow they needed to, or especially he needed to, try to explain it in some way.

I think I always felt, even from the very beginning, that there was something "Bauhaus" in his thinking, (like "a Josef Albers"), in posing a fundamental question: what is the electronic image? There were different terminologies they used at the beginning in trying to define this new medium, but especially in Woody's case, that terminology was reminiscent of the Bauhaus, at least in the beginning - in terms of an approach to "basic materials."

They came to the college where I was studying at SUNY New Paltz in late1973 and gave a lecture presentation. And then I kept in touch with them and within months started studying in Buffalo [Center for Media Study, SUNY Buffalo]. So my time in Buffalo is somewhat earlier than when you studied there. I was gone by summer 1975. It's also interesting because it was, unbelievably short! But of course, this period changed my life!

And even though I went onto other things we remained close. They kind of kidded me in the beginning - maybe they were a little upset that it seemed that I had "left them" (and video as well!). In the early period after I left Buffalo, Woody hoped that I would carry "the torch" of the electronic image forward. He spoke in that kind of language - as if we were on a mission, and he was thinking in terms of generations, thinking of the future.

It’s ironic, that even though they were both uncomfortable with teaching, they were still developing didactic languages to describe, archive and pass on their discoveries. In order to pass this on, somehow, from an archival point of view, they started collecting the tapes from everybody, immediately!  I had the feeling already at that time, in the ‘70s, that they had tapes by those that they considered within their canon with those with related intent: "like minds". Of course there were limitations to that, those who were considered part of their universe - like "who was in and who was out".

I remember they used to say (as a complaint) that when Nam June would come to the Kitchen [artists-run space in New York, co-founded by the Vašulkas in 1971] all those art people would attend.

CH: Yeah, yeah, I heard that too.

AD: Yeah. So they were in some ways strongly anti-art world (at least regarding the art market!). I once had a talk with Tony [Conrad] about this, years later, about that Media Study "anti-art world position" and he talked about how Jack Goldstein (the artist) came to Buffalo, and made him realize that there's other things going on and there are some very intelligent people out there in the art world.

But that was outside their circles. The Vašulkas were definitely on a modernist program as opposed to the "postmodern." I mean, though, I hate these categories...

CH: Yeah. Video was a new medium in the late 1960s at a time when many artists were challenging the museums and the gallery system that were fundamental to the “art world.”  Woody commented in a 1992 interview about how open the video medium was at that time and that was very attractive to him.

AD: Also, as you know, there was a period where they nearly went under. It's never talked about, this aspect, publicly. In the 1990's their sources of funding started to dry up, and a new generation of young artists, curators and institutional directors arose. Suddenly they found themselves in a somewhat different world where their legacy was not acknowledged in the same way.

But, let's get back to the archive. In the late ‘80s I made one very long trip with Woody, from Linz into Eastern Europe and all the way to Turkey, which was almost a disaster. I mean, it's a story in itself. He knew I was very involved in researching and travelling in Eastern Europe, in the ‘80s. I was living half of the year in Budapest, and I travelled extensively in the former "Comecon" countries.

At that time we conceived of "Project 2000," which turned into a proposal for [George] Soros at the time when he was first visiting Budapest to begin his initial funding project. The plan of our project was a kind of mobile research platform to archive Eastern Europe!

It's also interesting now to think of this project in terms of Woody's later work - Art of Memory [1987], his first tape really dealing with this, his own origins and legacy.

He helped me make the proposal to Soros - I was active in the scene in Budapest from ‘83 onward (travelling back and forth from Berlin for longer periods). I was present at an event at Péter Forgács' apartment [in Budapest] where George Soros was a "guest of honor." Everyone of substance I knew in the Hungarian Avant-Garde at that time were funded in that first round of funding. Soros later funded the purchasing of photocopy machines for institutions! [photo copy machines could not be accessed by ordinary citizens during socialism in most Eastern European countries before 1989].

CH: And then you were in the Béla Balázs Studio, right? You were working with the folks in Béla Balázs?

AD: I knew many of the filmmakers and was often there, but no, I was not there officially.

CH: With [Péter] Forgács?

AD: Yes, I was very close to Forgács In fact, I'm still in touch with him along with many others from the art, music and film scene. Do you know Kardos?

CH: Kardos. No, I don't know Kardos.

AD: Sándor Kardos. He was a very interesting artist and he was probably one of the most innovative cinematographers in Hungary. He had an enormous collection of private photographs. It’s first important to mention that there was a genre in Hungary dealing with found and amateur photography and film, and Forgács had worked with private film material for years. Gábor Bódy was probably the first to work with amateur film material. Kardos had a collection of private photos [the Horus Archives], hundreds of thousands of them, and they were arranged by archetypes in an enormous archive, which he created on his own, during the communist period. I was able to arrange an exhibition and catalog of his work in Holland in the ‘80s. [Horus Archives, 1989, AXON / Het Apollohuis/ László Bacsó Hungary]

In regards to "Project 2000" - I remember discussing this with Woody around 1987. The project would collect documentation in Eastern Europe, which he was very concerned about because it was his own legacy. I think he saw me as his "active agent." The application was refused because at that time, the [Soros] foundation could only fund Hungarians.

CH: Interesting. Well, you know, I knew that you had taken a trip with Woody then, because I understood that he was with you when you discovered the publication “Who’s Who” book in the bookstore. [Who's Who in Central & East Europe, The Central European Times Publishing Co. Ltd., Zurich, 1933-34]

AD: No, he was not.

CH: He wasn't?

AD: That was a different trip. That was was later. I have a friend who I knew from my MA studies at Wesleyan University, who became a musicologist. His name is Robert Labaree, and he was doing field work in Turkey, and I tagged along.  It was then that I found the copy of Who's Who in Central & East Europe at a used book store in Istanbul.  The finding of this book has changed my life and work.

But we did go through Istanbul on the trip with Woody, and we ended up somewhere in Anatolia in the desert with our Hungarian Dutch driver, who I actually met through Kardos, and who turned out to be very unpleasant and was very unpredictable. He literally threw us out of the car in the middle of nowhere in Anatolia!  And basically Woody was just buying his way out of everything. So we just kept paying, and then we ended up back in Istanbul and eventually made it back to Berlin.

CH: Oh, my God.

AD: Woody's idea was to go to Yerevan. Go all the way through as a kind of pilgrimage to Asia. Anyway, we passed through Ars Electronica (Linz) on that trip, and so that must have been 1988. That's when I first saw Tony’s Early Minimalism [Tony Conrad], and he asked me to be on the mixing board.

CH: Okay, so ‘87 was also when Woody made Art of Memory. Now you're saying that when you found the “Who's Who” book, that wasn't the same trip. But it seems like during that period, or a little earlier, mid ‘80s, he must have been working on Art of Memory. And at about that same time you're maybe encountering this project that just would take up the next couple of decades of your life.

AD: Right. He was talking about it, and it was clear that at this juncture we had some corresponding interests.

CH: And then also there was this whole research proposal about Eastern Europe.

AD: Yeah, it's interesting. I already had the “Who's Who” book at that time. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I definitely showed it to him. And actually, there's a scrapbook that I made, which had curated excerpts from my archive, and I sent the original copy to them, and I remember that they showed it to Ellen Zweig.  They realized at some point later that I should have it, and they sent it back, and then I made photocopies of the entire book and sent it to them. I was always sending them records from my travels, and this book was a kind of personal mosaic.

CH: When you were traveling with Woody, this was before 1989, like before the changes?

AD: Oh, yeah, it was the ‘80s. It’s interesting that the proposal for the project was subtitled "East European Sector Preliminary Proposal", very much Cold War terminology! At that time the Cold War seemed endless. We didn’t think anything was going to happen or change until maybe '88 or early '89. But, no, this is before. I initially stopped traveling in Eastern Europe after ‘89 and I'm just rekindling some of those connections now. But my interest in Eastern Europe was in the period before '89.

The “Who’s Who” opera [Who’s Who in Central and Eastern Europe 1933] was performed in Budapest and Prague in the ‘90s, but at that point I had shifted my focus. My intense activities in Eastern Europe were all in the ‘80s.

CH: Okay.

AD: And it's also interesting to say, it's kind of ironic, that when Woody and Steina talked about Czechoslovakia when I studied in Buffalo, it was as if they were talking about another world. Since my family came from East Europe I probably wasn't like most Americans at that time who didn't know the difference between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia! I was 21 when I arrived in Buffalo, and thought I knew a bit more than many other young Americans about Eastern Europe, but still, it was science fiction to me. And then I ended up very connected to the East when I came to Europe, in 1983.  Basically I spent at least a third or more of each year in Eastern Europe from 1983-89. My base was in Budapest because that was the only country in the Eastern Bloc where you didn't have to change money at a fictitious daily rate and the visa was much less complicated than in all the other East European countries.

CH: Okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that.

AD: Yeah. Hungary was generally more open. [János] Kádár gradually opened up the country in the ‘80s to the West and they had a different arrangement vis a vis Moscow. The Hungarians could leave and travel to the West. In fact, the art scene in the ‘80s in Budapest was an incredibly active scene, it was a really dynamic time.

CH: That makes sense. You didn't go to Czechoslovakia then, did you, with him [Woody]?

AD: Yeah, I was in Czechoslovakia with him, but strangely I never spent an intense period with them or him for a longer time in the Czech Republic or in the former Czechoslovakia. I was never with him in Brno [Czech city where Woody grew up], for instance. That would have been interesting!

CH: Yeah. And he was able to go to Czechoslovakia before 1989 [Velvet Revolution occurred in November, 1989]?

AD: He had an Icelandic passport.

CH: Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. Wow.

AD: I remember that right after 1989 they told me about a first trip to Prague afterwards as tourism started exploding, and Steina told me about him standing in the Old Town Square by the tourist clock shouting at random people, “You assholes, you are selling out!”

CH: Really?

AD: Because he just couldn't stand it. It was so hard, as an emigre, to see that. Just like former East Germans who had left to the West, and then seeing the East Germans running for their first bananas!

But I also have a strong memory that also relates to this somehow. In Buffalo, back in the 1970's, Petr Kotik gave a public presentation and discussion on Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together. Frederic was an orthodox leftist and the discussion turned on his political positions reflected in this work. And Woody at some point totally freaked out and began shouting, “I grew up during the war, with these loudspeaker systems and this stupid propaganda! - both as a child in the Nazi period and later in communism.” And they had a real emigre- socialist altercation right there, which as a student was a bit of a shock. It's a moment I've never forgotten.

CH: That’s interesting. My connection with Eastern Europe and the Czech Republic happened independent of them. It came through the Infermental project [an international “videomagazine,” 1980-1990], and Keiko [Sei], who was an editor of the Tokyo edition in 1988. We did a version of Infermental in Buffalo at Hallwalls [1987]. The Infermental project was of course initiated by the Hungarian filmmaker Gábor Bódy, and then Keiko had lived in Budapest for a short time.  I did meet some of those amazing artists in Budapest when I received a grant and traveled to Bucharest, Budapest and Prague with Keiko in the mid 1990s. But when I visited the Vašulkas in Santa Fe in 1992 to do research for the video history project [Surveying the First Decade, 1996], I think I hadn't been to Prague then yet. Any kind of conversation with the Vašulkas around Brno or the Czech Republic happened much later.

We don't have to talk about this, but I've tried to knit some things together in retrospect. For example, the Vašulkas were interested in the American West [where they lived after 1980], and as Woody is a Central European, he likely grew up with the Vinnetou stories by Karl May [German writer], his popular stories about the American West. That's another whole thing—the relationship of Central Europeans to the American West through the late 19th century novels of May, which I learned about after I had spent some time in the Czech Republic. The American Southwest landscape is so prominent in Woody’s Art of Memory. I am curious now about those possible connections that may have resonance with his childhood, but I never had that experience of talking to them about any early fascination they might have had for the American West, or really anything about Eastern Europe either.  I know they traveled by car through the American West in the late 1970s.

We had a couple of chats about Brno later, I think, because we both taught briefly in the Video Studio in the university in Brno [in the early-mid 1990s]. And I had heard from folks in Brno that Woody was treated badly at some point because he was someone who had left during socialism for the West— not by [Tomáš] Ruller and the people he had worked with in the Video Studio in Brno, but by the guy who was the head of that art school at the time.

AD: Who was the head of the art school then?

CH: I can't remember his name.

AD: Interesting. But that's a typical emigre problem. Like, "how dare you talk when we were here the whole time." It happened everywhere in Eastern Europe when those who left came back.  

CH: Exactly. I participated in reviewing students in Brno one semester, and I had a translator because, of course, they were speaking in Czech. And I didn't really participate much. I mostly listened. But at the end, I went up to shake the director’s hand and he was literally wearing a cape and had a big handlebar mustache – it seemed very 19th century - and he wouldn't shake my hand. And when I complained to Ruller and I said, is he discriminating against me because I'm a woman? He said, well, mostly because you're an American, and don't feel bad because he did the same thing to Woody. He wouldn't shake his hand either when he was teaching here.

AD: What year is this? What would you say that would have been?

CH:  Maybe 1993 or 94.

AD: Yeah, that's the period before the old guard died off. Also in Prague, in the Art Academy. I mean, they were terrible times. Just think now of [Milan] Knížák!

CH: Well, I encountered Knížák at a school event. I didn't hang out with him at all when I was there, but I heard from friends about his fantastic puppet collection.

AD: Yeah, he had his credentials from the earlier period. He was in contact with René Block in Berlin as an early Fluxus artist and connection to the East Bloc. He had those credentials from Fluxus but later as head of the Art Academy [AVU] and the National Gallery he seemed to "change sides" in assuming power in the art world in Prague. It was very disappointing. And it took a long time for those earlier apparatchiks to be washed away. I was with my students in Prague in recent years, and there's a whole new and very informed generation that's taken over.

CH: So when were you in Prague at AVU?

AD:  I went with my students, in 2014.

Each country in the Soviet Bloc has its own cultural history and differences in the level and means of repression across different periods. So, between Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia there were great differences.

CH: Completely different, yeah.

AD: Even though there was communication and exchange between them. During the ‘80s, I was very often in East Berlin at this time and had contact to the "underground" cultural and intellectual scene to some extent.

CH: The year that our Buffalo edition of Infermental went to the Berlinale, it was 1988, and Rotraut Pape lived in Berlin and she had also been one of the early editors of the Infermental project.  Tony [Conrad], Peter Weibel, Rotraut and I curated and edited the Buffalo version of Infermental [1988]. When I was in Berlin, I forget who arranged it, but probably Rotraut got in touch with someone who had been the contact person for work from East Germany. I'm sure you know him because he eventually became the director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

AD: Tannert. Christoph Tannert, yeah.

CH: And Tannert had been the contact person for Infermental. He had collected work from East Germany and somehow got it smuggled out to someone in the West, who then sent the tapes on to us in Buffalo. We went to East Berlin one evening to have dinner with him. And of course I had no idea what to expect. And it was pretty startling. We went to some restaurant where there was one thing on the menu. Well, there were more things on the menu, but they only had one thing to serve. And he had amazing stories about how an alternative underground culture was then being practiced in East Berlin. He was such an interesting person, and that exchange was very important to me.

AD: But that's so typical to offer only one thing on the menu, but of course the menu itself is vast! When my friends from East Berlin once visited me in Budapest in the ‘80s they thought all my friends were rich and privileged, because they always ate in restaurants. Hungary was the exception. Christoph is still the director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien. He's retiring soon, or has maybe has just retired.  

CH: Yes, he was very committed to there being some possibility of exchange of work, and had taken personal risks to smuggle contemporary media art out of the East for Infermental. So I had a little contact with Berlin at that time. And of course Keiko had spent time there. Once she moved to Eastern Europe from Japan, she spent time in Budapest, Prague and in Berlin.

AD: And. And you must know Adele [Eisenstein].

CH: I don't know her well, but I have met her. Where is she?

AD: She's in New York now. She has an apartment in Budapest. Yeah, she was in Budapest later, and she curated the Butterfly Effect: The Coordinates of the Moment Before Discovery exhibition at the Soros Center in Budapest in 1996.

CH: There’s an exhibition...I don't know that there's any music or sound projects in it... But there's an exhibition or art and photography at the Walker [Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis] right now called Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in East Central Europe, 1960s to 1980s. The curator at the Walker since 2015 is Pavel Pyś, a Polish Australian. And one of my students gave me the catalog as a gift. It's got incredible documentation of art projects in East Central Europe before 1989.

AD: Okay, I'll look for that. I'm in the States in April.

CH: I'm thinking about going to Minneapolis to see the exhibition. The essays in the book are quite interesting. And there is a discussion with a group of curators that have now gone back into the archives of FAMU [Czech film school, Prague] and the Polish Film School in Łodz and have found films that were made by students from the Global South, socialist countries, before 1989. I can send you the link to the article. A couple of those films are online now. Some of them have Polish voiceover or Polish dialogue, but they're simple enough in structure that you can understand what’s happening, and there are brief descriptions as well. They're strong student films, and they're very moving because they tend to have to do with social issues in the countries where they were attending film school, conditions they were themselves experiencing, but sometimes also situations in their home countries.

AD: That's interesting because we just saw an exhibition a few weeks ago in Dresden about the relation of the DDR to the Global South. It's in the Albertina Museum. It's mainly concerning exchanges between non-European artists coming to the DDR on residencies and to teach. It was fascinating.

While there's propaganda in it, I thought the texts were quite differentiated. There's contemporary works as a kind of counterpoint. There was one from Vietnam who did something about where he or she lived in Berlin in the ‘70s. But we're getting off topic here.

CH: Yeah, we are getting off topic, but it's fun.

AD: Yeah, exactly.

CH: ...Okay, so there's their whole commitment to archiving, and we should talk a little bit about the Vašulkas curating Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt, [1992 exhibition at Ars Electronica, Linz] and also MindFrames [2006 exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe], maybe in a minute. But the other thing that's very interesting to me is Steina's Violin Power project, a project that has evolved in important ways over 40+ years.

AD: Yeah, I read your article again [“Introduction to Steina and her Performance of Violin Power,” Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, 2011, unpublished].

CH: I was doing a curatorial project in the late 1990s/early 2000s about artists who were re-performing archives or working with archives in provocative ways. And so I was interested in your work. I was also interested in Barbara Lattanzi [also an early Media Study Buffalo graduate], who was appropriating the editing strategies of late ‘60s/early‘70s structural filmmakers in her work in the early 2000s. She was coding these kind of VJ-ing, idiosyncratic editing open-source projects. There were some other people, too, and Steina's work Violin Power (1978, 1991-present) was very interesting to me. And especially once she had access to digital tools [MIDI violin], then she could actually access excerpts from her archive in real time while she was performing live on stage, with each performance being different.

So there's that project, and then also Woody's Art of Memory [1987], which I think happened at a time, and you made reference to this in the email, about him feeling that they had been ignored by the media art world, and also that Peter [Weibel] was one of the few people that actually supported their later work, and especially these important curatorial projects.

AD: That’s right.

CH: I remember Woody when he came to Buffalo to show Art of Memory at Hallwalls [artists-run gallery], and he seemed depressed about the media art world then, although of course he was still very engaging and performative. He talked about this project being the work of a middle aged man who basically had lost faith in the continuation of his “tribe,” or all of the people that were part of that early incredible discovery of this language of waveforms and frequencies and voltages, that unity of materials, and how that world had now shifted to be involved with something completely different. And the galleries and the media art aesthetics that were driving the art world were not reflecting ideas that he had invested so much in exploring.

So at the Hallwalls screening my sense was that he introduced Art of Memory as almost an apology to an audience that included former colleagues in the arts community where he had made so many important contributions to a structural investigation of electronic materials. And yet the more I've thought about it and taught it over the years, it's really such a fucking brilliant piece. And it is such an incredible integration of his media art discoveries and ideas and tools and ways of thinking about space and, of course, memory. And then there's this whole other thing reflected to some degree in that project that is about him growing up across the road from an airfield that had been bombed in World War II, and that post-war landscape and machines in ruin being his first introduction to the destruction of culture. I don't know how you feel about Art of Memory or Violin Power, but maybe we should say something about both of those pieces.

AD: Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up these two works. He admitted himself that he made a clear move to integrate other types of content [in Art of Memory]. But it is interesting to note that in the past, there had been other attempts to expand beyond the medium itself or the discovery of new tools. Some of the early Rutt-Etra [specific analog tool often used by Woody] tapes such as Reminiscence from 1974 utilized and manipulated video documentation of a visit to his family in Brno at that time. Remember that? That would be a predecessor of sorts. But it was definitely non-referential.  Perhaps one can see Art of Memory as a response to changes in the art world but I also see it —and you mentioned that he admitted it— that as one gets older one begins to look back. I think it was very brave of him.
They had a difficult time from the late ‘90s, as video art and the art world itself moved on to more social and political themes. From a certain point they were not being invited as often to show work. From the ‘70s to the ‘80s, for so many years, they just seemed to just get one grant after another. They were very well funded. That's why they didn't need to teach, because it seemed endless, an unlimited source or support. And then that gradually dried up.

But Art of Memory kind of unifies, in a way, all of Woody's interests. The waveforms are there, but it's also his attempt to deal with his own history and also the trauma of post-war Europe.

There’s The Commission video opera in 1983 with Robert Ashley. It's a fusing of his interests with the monumentality of the West Coast landscape. There was of course a predecessor in The West [installation] from 1983 by Steina (Woody did the audio).

There's a kind of an interesting clash between Eastern Europe in these works—this dark and dirty and claustrophobic place—and then the vast open landscape, which is, of course, a great attraction for Europeans, for whom the sense of open space was almost like being on the moon. Of course they also had intense experiences in that direction in Iceland. They used to go every year to Iceland, sometimes with Alfons [Schilling]. So, come to think of it, the early landscape tapes were in fact shot in Iceland.  So that's also a predecessor of sorts.

In Art of Memory it's a projection onto landscape - as if history is metaphorically a projection. We invent the present and the past, so it’s also a projection of the mind. So that work involves multiple layers. Woody was reading Art of Memory at that time (by Frances Yates, 1966), which is a seminal book on medieval and classical memory technic—it was also important for Robert Ashley and also for Tony (Conrad). For me, this work was the beginning of a new artistic period. I didn't get on so easily with the opera [The Commission, 1983]. At the time, I had difficulties accessing it somehow.

CH: Yeah, The Commission also doesn't work well for me. But the Art of Memory, even though it's these completely different sensibilities, like you said, the American Southwest and Eastern Europe, combined through the mnemonic technique that Yates described, where you connect or project the things you want to remember onto a familiar landscape that you can easily conjure up at some later point. It makes sense to me in a way that The Commission did not. In The Commission, it seems like he was trying to develop these different visual languages, and it’s also a reflection on music history.

AD: I think it was ambitious. But working with theatrical drama can be challenging. Though the intent was certainly interesting, it did seem a bit artificial. But then followed his last installation in Japan.

CH: The Brotherhood [1990-98].

AD: Yes. The Brotherhood. I think that's a culmination of sorts for me. It has almost a Duchampian flavor to it, even though he would probably never say that himself. It's as if the machines represent characters, as automata that carry out absurd actions. It's an interesting work that turns on his many obsessions. And it also represents, gradually, the period after which their individual interests diverged, at least publicly.

In regards to Steina's Violin Power, if you apply the terminology “archive” to this work then one might say that the archive discussion is really about access. The archive is sleeping and dusty and hidden, and she's in fact playing or performing the archive. So it's a kind of performative regurgitation of historical material of hers. And also a bonding of her own technical facility from childhood [as a violinist] in connection with live accessing of the electronic and digital medium. There is always something very playful about her work. Both optical and optically playful, and certainly less didactic than in Woody's approach. Also her later installations—the focus on waterfalls and nature—are very lyrical, poetic and non-pretentious.

CH: And musical. Her works always seem like fugues to me. It's like I'm watching Bach fugues. Everything's going forwards and then backwards.

AD: Yes, in the structure...

CH: Because she treats the visual movement, as well as the auditory, with forward and backwards movements. In general, I'm not used to seeing the visual material played with in the same way as the audio—it’s a surprise. Maybe for her it’s exercising a kind of machine language. It doesn't register in the same way that listening to a Bach fugue does. You know, you just listen and watch the visual phrase going this way, and now it's going the other way.

AD: Retrograde!

CH: Yeah. I want to say that she violates something, maybe she violates visual expectations, for those of us that live in a narrative world so much, and narratives have a forward progression. But it's also very playful, and it's completely consistent with the other way that she works with landscape, which also has its own narrative and reality, lens-based reality even--what Woody was trying to get away from by concentrating on the electronic space.

Yeah, the other thing that's interesting to me about, and again, this brings your work in, too, but I just wanted to throw this out, is that Rick Prelinger...you must know Rick Prelinger?

AD: Oh, yes, of course. Actually, I don't know him, but I've used material from that archive, and I've seen interviews with him.

CH: And one of the things that he says oftentimes has to do with the need to perform archives in the present. We're friends from a long time ago. I saw him do a presentation ten years ago in Los Angeles, but it's something that he's been doing for the last decade in various cities, where he shows this material that's in his film archive [Prelinger Archive] that was originally made as part of Hollywood productions. For example, in a film where a car is moving, you see something like the passing city scape or landscape out the back window, or out the side window. The difference in exposure for what's happening inside the car and outside of the car is too extreme for the film to handle. So they actually had to matte those moving pictures of the street outside the car onto the film shot from within the car. So to record those scenes Hollywood cinematographers just drove around LA, and other cities in the United States where they were making a film, and recorded street footage that would be matted into the moving car scene in the movie. And so Prelinger does this performance where he plays, like in LA, he played all these silent matte clips that were recorded over a 30 year period of driving around LA, and then asks the audience to provide the soundtrack. He encourages the audience to shout out the identity of the street or places on the screen. So someone in the audience will shout out, oh, that's such and such a street corner before they built that new building, for example. And the entire audience gets involved. And then Prelinger’s introduction to this performance is about how archives have to be re-used, that they have to be re-performed in different ways. And so I think that you and Steina and Rick all share that interest in a very profound way.

AD: Well, in my case, my many decades of work with biographical archive material has generated an interest on the actual archive itself, the administrative archive. I mean, the archive as an institution. So not as a metaphorical term, but more to look at how an archive functions. I've done a lot of research in that direction and have collaborated over the years with various archival institutions. And yet, my works with the archive are "cut-ups" or "hypertexts" of archival material.

In this regard -  probably an interesting biographical archival work from the early ‘90s had been based on the archival materials from one particular historical figure whom I uncovered. It was almost like a mirror - as if you could take one person's biography that would represent the entire Who’s Who in Central & East Europe.

CH: This is the “T” documentation project?

AD: Yes. It was first based on a consideration of the archival document itself. I re-created documents from international archives, and then began working with live data retrieval from archival databases - a kind of live streaming from the archive as a projection. The software would search and find and display according to "guided chance" operations. And then there were those large-scale performances starting in the ‘90s: the Memory Arena and The Memory Project. Those were live, simultaneous readings, where hundreds of people would read from selections from the archive at the same time, in spaces within a functioning and symbolic archive and where the files would be distributed by functionaries. A kind of living archive simulation.

And then more recently, there's been a number of developing archival projects...for instance the Black Mountain College projects [PERFORMING the Black Mountain ARCHIVE] which was realized first in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin [2015], where students from various artistic disciplines performed the archive during a four-month long exhibition on Black Mountain College. I worked a couple of years in collecting and developing a Black Mountain duplicate archive, which I still have in my studio. The students would explore the archive and then, according to my score, perform the archive within the exhibition in varying spaces within the Black Mountain exhibition. The intention was that the archive would truly come alive.

Another example would be a project at the Akademie der Künste, which holds the largest German language art archive in Europe. In 2021 I created a project called Archive Carousel for which I selected 80 artifacts from their archive which dates to 1694. My selection was a mixture of random things...an unidentified stone, a tablecloth, artifacts from the fascist period, and even a Nam June Paik video. It was inspired by [John] Cage's Rollyholyover in which a visual exhibition would move and be changed and exchanged every day.

In my version the exhibition artifacts were moved to different locations or exchanged for other objects every two, three or four days according to a score. So it was my idea to work with the "performance" of objects instead of live performers. It was actually a collection that re-assembled itself, a "performing collection."

CH: Wow. Well, it also struck me...I just read a little bit about your Black Mountain project the other day...

AD: There's a publication documenting that project: Black Mountain College as Multiverse, 2022.

Well, maybe when I come to the states I could get it to you.

CH: Okay. By the way, the Hammer Museum in LA did a big exhibition on Black Mountain.

AD: Yes, I have the catalogue.

CH: It seemed like with the Black Mountain piece there might be a handshake with Woody, Steina and Peter’s [Weibel] MindFrames exhibition [2006]. I think actually the Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt [1992] show too, is really like documentation from this community of artists and engineers in New York at a certain time. But MindFrames, which exhibited work from those media artists teaching at the Center for Media Study in Buffalo starting in the early 1970s, captures a seminal and inventive group of artists working with the moving image and sound during an important cultural moment, and is perhaps related to Black Mountain in some sense ...but I didn't see MindFrames in Karlsruhe.

AD: Yes, I was there.

CH: So I'm just going on [media curator and writer] John Minkowsky's description [of MindFrames in the book Buffalo Heads, 2008].

AD: Yes, John, an important but largely forgotten figure. I visited the show [ZKM, MindFrames] and I hung out with Woody during the preparation. It was a strange time because he got a lot of flak for how he approached that show.

CH: He did? I’m surprised.

AD: Yeah, first of all. It included only the professors. So some people thought, yeah, what about everybody else?

CH: Well, yeah.

AD: But that was a curatorial decision. It was good that the documentary filmmaker James Blue, also a relatively forgotten figure, was also included. Woody did a tremendous amount of research, collecting archival material on all of the participants. He had a conflict with Tony [Conrad]. What Woody was interested in, of course, was his early structural work — Tony was not at all interested to show that work at that time.

CH: Wow. Major differences.

AD: There were other issues.  For instance, Steina realized a version of Zorn's Lemma [1970 film by Hollis Frampton] on computer.

CH: Oh, really?

AD: Which, as an analytical tool, it was really unbelievable. I never really perceived the full structure of that film until I experienced her version, where you could really dive into the structure. You can go forwards and backwards [when it’s digital], which you can't do when you're just watching a film.

And then with Paul Sharits, there were two issues. For one, I remember that Steina realized a video version of one of his films according to his score.  It’s interesting that Paul, who was in Fluxus, was the only one (of the professors) who had deeper connections to the art world. In fact, he made visual scores for his films. Steina said, "well, if he had had the possibility (to do it digitally), maybe he would have done it." You could get these really clean color fields which was not possible on film. And of course, the film people went crazy about it.

But also Woody had set up the exhibition so that all the works were running on a server [so all the media was digitized and could be accessed throughout the exhibition], which was way ahead of its time. Also Woody worked with the Japanese architect Sato Shinya. The exhibition architecture was like a village of white rounded cabins as viewing spaces. You could just look up the schedule and then wander into these different spaces. At that time, in 2006, it [the technical set up of the exhibition] was really way ahead of its time. But of course, the estate of Sharits was not happy about showing some of his films as video. Woody said to me, “well, if they want the sound of the projector, I can just put a sample in there of projector sound.” It's interesting that he refused to admit that there might be a different experience watching projected film.

This goes back to the earlier war between film and video, which I experienced as a student. It was a really heavy conflict back then, which again "broke out" at the Media Study Jubilee (Buffalo, 2009) in celebration of the publication of Buffalo Heads. The conflict re-enacted itself. At an event honoring the legacy of the Center for Media Study (with Gerry O'Grady present after being banned from the campus for years) the film people were shouting at the video people!

Also, I think its important to state that for Woody, it was all in the code. For instance, he refused to accept that music was anything more than the code, the score—he negated the emotional and sensory aspects.

But in terms of the archive, he was continually asking, how are we going to preserve everything? And he used to say to me a lot - and I really treasure those discussions - where he would ask, "what will last?" Now, thinking about it, these discussions were a great influence on my later work. Today there's the "Long Now Foundation" from Stewart Brand which addresses this topic. But Woody was talking about this back in the 1980s saying, "the only solution would be scratches in stone. I mean, it's the only chance for us. The problem is of course that we can't get much content onto stone!”

CH: Yeah. When I visited them in 1992 and did an interview with them, and did some research on their work and their archive, they were so very generous. Steina said, “you can copy anything.”

AD: They didn’t really care about ownership, actually they wanted the opposite, to propagate and share.

CH: And they had been working on the Eigenwelt exhibition project at the time. I think it was more or less finished. But the other thing Woody was doing then was trying to figure out what file format would have archival value as the world was just becoming digital. And this was like ‘92, so you couldn't even put anything moving on the internet at that point.

AD: That’s right. I confirm that. So he was in the ‘80s thinking about those issues. How do we keep this? How can it be somehow preserved what we did, and how can we show it later? And all those questions which are still pertinent. I mean, even though we can store all this material, as we know, the hard disks die, and we don't know what format we're going to have in the future, what technology. It's actually, in some ways, even more of a nightmare. I also think they were very early in understanding that digital code meant there was no medium anymore.

I grew up in video art. For my students [now], video doesn't exist, I mean, it's interchangeable with film. And of course, you had to show them celluloid and make a whole big point about it for them to notice. But for them, a still photo, a moving image, it’s all the same thing - a photo is just one frame out of a moving digital image, so if you grow up with that, everything else is just like Babylon!

CH: Exactly. No, it's true. For the first video history class that I was teaching at CalArts, they put me in the auditorium and all this early video was being projected on a huge screen. And finally I thought, this is so far away from what early video was when it could only be shown on monitors, and the resolution was so low. And of course, early black and white analog video is just a completely different medium anyways from high definition video that they are now used to watching.

AD: Some years ago I located my early video work (1974-75), which had been presumed lost, and had it digitized at ZKM. I showed them in Italy in a solo exhibition in 2018. I've tried to show them as projections, but the perceptual effect of those phosphors on the back of the glass is missing. So we found old CRT monitors. A really powerful projector is needed to simulate that.

Even though it was Woody who greatly influenced my work in audio and music (his interest in waveforms) - leading finally to La Monte Young and of course Tony (Conrad), he always insisted that all the information could be described in either a score or in some kind of code. But I've always felt that you can't represent all aspects as schemata. So I remember we used to playfully argue about that, because this was touching on so much of my work. There was something in him that seemed to be looking for some kind of coding, not in the sense of computer software, but as if there was a key to everything, that there was a way to unlock it.

CH: This is interesting because I was thinking about this interview and how should we deal with the early years in terms of the Vašulkas’ interest in archiving and stuff like that. And it seemed to me Woody talks a lot about what that early scene was like, and the excitement about sharing discoveries and new tools, and Steina also talks about it, too, in slightly different ways. Actually, one of the things that she says [in an interview], which is kind of amazing, and maybe their archiving efforts are related to this—she’s talking about art as a deep desire to communicate. And then, she says, “we spend so much time with people we have never met—often with people who are long dead”—like composers, let's say, from her point of view. And then she says, “but, through lucky coincidences, artists and their audiences have sometimes found each other in the same place at the same time. Paris in the 1920s was like that. New York in the late 1960s was like that for us. It was a luxury.”

Their late ‘60s/early ‘70s audiences were really engaged with the work in some direct and critical way. So I was thinking, well, that's not the same thing as archiving, but it has something to do with the importance of focusing an art practice at a moment in time. And you're talking about Woody's desire to code. And then there's this. When I interviewed Tony [Conrad] for the history project [Surveying the First Decade, 1996], he said, “The work is part of a larger cultural object, which includes the production and viewing situation, and that the object itself cannot be sensibly taken out of context as an object of contemplation in and of itself. It's simply incomplete or fragmentary without regard to its functioning as a consequence of the circumstance of its generation and the audience impact.” So he's reflecting on...

AD: That’s an amazing statement.

CH: I know. It's so great. He said that in the context of reflecting on making art in the ‘60s in an interview I did for research (1995) on the Surveying project. Then later I wrote this article [Millennium Film Journal, 2003] about Barbara Lattanzi's work [HF Critical Mass, 2002]. One of her projects had to do with appropriating Hollis Frampton's editing algorithm from his film Critical Mass [1971]. Then I did a little bit of research on Frampton’s Critical Mass, and it was done in 1971, and it was the same year that he wrote this essay called “A Meta-History of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” [in Circles of Confusion, 1983]. And in that essay he talks about the film strip as an ongoing meta-historical film project. He says, “There's no evidence in the structural logic of the film strip that distinguishes footage from a finished work. Thus, any piece of film may be regarded as footage for use in any imaginable way to construct or reconstruct a new work.”

AD: Hollis wrote this?

CH: In 1971.

AD: That's really amazing.

CH: Yeah, Frampton seems like a kind of a film purist, but he's a structuralist, so he's really trying to look at this logic of the film strip. “Therefore, it may be possible for the meta-historian to take old work as footage and construct from it identical new work necessary to a tradition” [Hollis Frampton].

Anyway, you've sort of started answering the earlier question, or maybe the answer to the question is that Woody was all about finding the code. So because they were all structuralists and really thinking in such a larger way about the media experience as well as the media work. I think Woody especially, and Steina's perspectives on this comes from being European as well.

AD: In fact, I remember that in at least one conversation with Woody, where we were talking about the Western classical music tradition. And at that time, I was very interested in early composers and musical traditions that had been forgotten and the whole question of instrumentation. Because of my experimentation with instrumentation, I was very much interested in performances on the instruments of the time period, and as close as possible to the style of that time, even though I understood that a full reconstruction is impossible. And Woody was absolutely against that. He insisted that the music is the notes, basically, that are played, which I totally disagree with, even now.

What Hollis said...even though his work is so much about making this final, perfectly constructed thing, he was recognizing that actually, even a piece of film is inherently not different from what's in the final product. And one could say that, even if you could look back at the Vašulkas. I remember the time when we all started out, in those early years, you could hardly edit. It was really, like, ridiculous. I mean, you would cut and splice the videotape as in audio, or you could try to run two machines at the same time and then push an "edit" button - but it was very imprecise. So basically, each tape represented a particular situation and you just let it run.

CH: Performance, there’s a connection with performance in early analog video.

AD: That's right. It's performative in that sense. And it was also only an excerpt of what could have been - it was an example out of a process that one set up and then executed and recorded, which I think is also interesting. So this idea of it being a kind of finished work is an illusion, perhaps.

Going back now to consider the period in which the Vašulkas were no longer as strongly supported as they had been earlier, it was very important for them that Peter [Weibel], recognized their importance.  He gave them many opportunities in Europe. But in the States, they were certainly not prepared for the changes in what was considered Videoart, especially after all that they had done for the early medium and the community which they had fostered so intensively.

In some ways, there is an interesting reflection of Woody and Steina's interests in the nature of analog electronics which comes back in now within the digital world - especially in club scene. There are actually some digital artists that are doing flicker stuff and color fields and also working a bit abstractly, exploring analog, often with the correspondence of sound.

CH: As we’re talking about introducing analog music or media art work from an earlier period into the present, there’s also Tony Conrad’s performances starting in the 1990s of music that was conceptualized and performed in the 1960s with the Theater of Eternal Music.  Well, there was a period of time where Tony and I weren't talking to each other. And then we would have these periodic moments where we encountered each other for a short period of time and that was okay. So my sense of how his more recent music performances functioned for him is a fragmented picture. But it was interesting to see him go back to the music and then have this enormous following. He's a good performer, even when he's just on stage. I mean, whatever he's doing, he's a performer. But maybe there is something about that music and his homemade instruments. I haven't seen any of his performances since probably 1990 or something like that. I mean, I've listened to the CDs. But yeah, it's interesting to see how that did work for him and of course his commentary about that work and that history is so valuable.

I think that there are other things, ways of working, that are lost and maybe found...like another thing that Woody was also disappointed about when I talked to him in the early 1990s. He was mourning the fact that his discovery of taking video off its electronic frame using a Rutt-Etra instrument [C-Trend, 1974; Art of Memory,1987] was somehow never acknowledged by the field as this amazing moment, some kind of aesthetic breakthrough, structural aesthetic breakthrough that was essential to the difference between analog video and film, having been trained as a filmmaker and then becoming a video pioneer. And really, there’s both that important conceptual and aesthetic discovery, as well as the images that he created with the Rutt-Etra—they're completely mesmerizing.

AD: Actually, it's the Paik-Abe video synthesizer that finally got the credit for video synthesis, and of course [Nam June] Paik. The Rutt-Etra has fallen into oblivion! When I left Buffalo, I came back to New York, and it was through the influence of Woody and Steina that I began to focus on audio frequencies. Also Tony [Conrad] came and gave a lecture while I was still in Buffalo, and there was Woody going on endlessly about "The Waveform." But I found the experience of audio waves more visceral, more body-oriented than the images that could be generated from it.

There were of course other influences. I wasn't in the Music Department [of SUNY Buffalo], but Morton Feldman was the head of the Music Department then, and since he knew my family, he admitted me to "June in Buffalo" in 1974 with Pauline Oliveros and the electronic music composer Joel Chadabe. That's a crazy connection from the New York City Garment District, but that's a story in itself. But I had no traditional music background back then.

For Woody the waveform was a kind of "atomic principle" behind everything. He was trying to get to the smallest particle, so to say, the eureka moment, the continuing reduction. This was before digital, but Woody was always looking for the key, first the waveform and later the code.  And through that, of course, I recognized the connection to audio frequencies and finally, sound. My last tapes at Buffalo involved two color burst signals beating against each other, propelling the image through red, green, and blue so fast that you couldn't actually see the colors themselves. At the end, I projected it into the audience. Everybody started throwing up. And then I felt I had gone too far, this going right to the brain, and I wasn't sure that art should go there. And that was my last visual work, until the late ‘80s in Europe. Then at a drunken Media Study party in Hollis Frampton's apartment, I found a copy of Selected Writings by La Monte Young, with that famous [Richard] Kostelanetz interview from 1965 with La Monte. And that started my period with La Monte.

I went back to New York where I attended a La Monte Young concert, and then I became his student and later tape archivist. For me, this all flowed directly from Woody - into sound. Because what interested me about sound is that you can really feel and perceive the waves as energy, as a material, which you couldn’t in video. In video, you were watching it, you were observing, basically, you were looking at an oscilloscope with multiple lines. Back in Buffalo, also Alvin Lucier visited (I later studied with him at Wesleyan). He performed a version of Music for Snare Drum, Pure Wave Oscillator and one or more Reflective Surfaces where you felt the waves in the room within your body and this and I felt that's where I want to go.

It's only much later, that I heard Tony [Conrad] perform - in Ars Electronica in ‘87.

CH: The work related to what he had done with La Monte and the Theater of Eternal Music?

AD: I think it was a very early performance by Tony - the beginning of Early Minimalism. It was amazing to hear the music performed again, which was the music that he performed with La Monte in the most interesting period of the Theater of Eternal Music. And then I found out that actually he did have more to do with the creation of that music than La Monte wanted to acknowledge. So I've written about that. There was a resurgence of interest in my music directly related to Tony's rediscovery in the ‘90s. Again there's lineages.

CH: Oh, that's interesting.

AD: Okay. Did you have classes with Woody and Steina?

CH:  So when I came to graduate school at UB, they were in the process of moving to Santa Fe, but it was still very interesting. I'm very, very happy that I experienced them. I forget if I had them for one or two semesters, but it was no longer than two semesters. Basically, in the classroom, the camera was pointed out the window on the sidewalk below and there were all these oscillators and other units patched together, and they were, I don't know, they were sort of performing something, but they weren't really teaching. And I was very confused because I had come with a much more conventional version of media, even though I knew that I wanted to study something having to do with perception, because that's what I had done as an undergraduate at University of Michigan, psychology of perception, where I was working with tachistoscopes and vision in very short durations. But that's another conversation.

And then Steina, at some point in the semester, she showed the earlier version of Violin Power, the analog version of Violin Power, and it was like, okay, now I understand why they're talking about waveforms. Before that, I didn't really get why they were completely uninterested in what the camera was picking up.

AD: Right.

CH: But then I understood after seeing the audio signal interact visually with the video image in Violin Power. And then I didn't fall in love with it at that point, but I realized that there just was this whole depth to what I was going to learn at Media Study that I hadn't anticipated.

AD: Right.

CH: And then, really, it was when I went to visit them in Santa Fe, when I was working on the video history project in the early ‘90s. And I stayed across the road at their neighbor’s bed and breakfast, and for two or three days spent time with them. Maybe there was a certain kind of modesty at that point. I didn't know yet what I was going to include in the Surveying the First Decade project, but in the end I did include quite a bit of their work compared to other people in that early video history project, because their work was so critically important. We had engaged conversations about media history. And I think the interview that I did with them is strong. I mean, Woody's part of the interview was great because he was very forthcoming, articulate, insightful. And Steina, of course, was very attentive, didn't get so involved with theoretical stuff, but was very generous with information and especially the history of their time in New York and the various “tribes” of early video experimentation, everyone sharing information, and a sense of their intentions and the spirit of the early Kitchen.

AD: Right.

CH: Being a student at Media Study—at the time I was there it was initially quite confusing. I mean, Media Study was this dysfunctional department in many ways by that time. As a student you had to be self-guided but also your education exposed you to artists who had defined the structural media field and whose commitment to their ideas and work was profound if not always easy to digest at first exposure. And that was an important education as well—to be uncomfortable and questioning and not expect to be taught a canon or be entertained. Also, in retrospect, not everyone [the faculty] was healthy by then. The department featured a collection of big personalities that were often arguing with each other when I was there. Oh, my God. Yeah. And then Tony was kind of different and, at that time (early ‘80s), he was more engaged with the broader Buffalo arts community, which was a rich cultural scene with Media Study/Buffalo, Hallwalls, CEPA, a punk music scene.

AD: Yeah, Tony was different. When I was there, it’s incredible to think about it, they were all still alive.

CH: Yeah.

AD: [Hollis] Frampton, and [Paul] Sharits was still really teaching, and... well, it was just a lot of egos. I was close to Gerry [O’Grady], actually. He was the one who created Media Study [both the department at the university and was director of the publicly supported media center, Media Study/Buffalo].

CH: Gerry was important.

AD: And remained so. Also, there were periods I didn't see Woody and Steina. I was never in New Mexico, which I, of course, now I regret, but I've been living in Europe, and I would always come to New York, and they would come through Berlin a lot.

But I do agree with you that it’s interesting to look at the Vašulkas in relation to the archive.  In this sense, Eigenwelt, was of course, really quite important. But how many people even know about that exhibition now? As you point out, the use of the barcode to access was a work of genius at that time!

CH: Right? Yeah. They were really happy about that. When I visited them, they were so excited about their discovery of how to apply the barcode for viewers to interact with work in that exhibition.

AD: Yeah. Today would be a QR code, but they were way ahead of their time in that. But also in a weird way, a lot of those early figures in that exhibition [Eigenwelt], feel like a part of my adolescence! I was so young! And then, thinking of [Eric] Siegel with his early colorizer, and [Bill] Etra – a lot of them were engineers who kind of went a little off, took some acid and lost themselves in these forms and colors. This was just at the end of the ‘60s, after all, which to me seemed to end in the mid-70s. Somehow the Vašulkas had a central role in all of this - early Video scene - even if not all this early work was really interesting.

CH: Yeah.

AD: Just as in the Kitchen, they networked all of them and kind of held them together in dialogue, as a community. Later there were the programmers—this period came a bit after me because I wasn't really present in the digital phase. Some of the programmers [for example, Jeff Schier] worked with them for years and were really important in doing the impossible. Woody and Steina understood that the programmer can be thought of more as an architect than an artist in the traditional sense, you're constructing something, and there are philosophical aspects. So I wonder a lot how to represent that now. This publication [Eigenwelt catalog] was really a totally unusual statement.

Actually music technology is really a predecessor for all of this -  synthesizer people like [Don] Buchla...

CH: [Robert] Moog.

AD: Moog was often in Buffalo to meet with Bode. I met them both as a young student with Woody and Steina.

CH: Harald Bode.

AD: Harald Bode, the inventor of the Ring Modulator, who lived in Buffalo. The audio people were much less nerdy and conservative than the television people, who were all from the broadcast world.  

CH: Actually, the catalog to Eigenwelt [1992] has a long essay [“The Apparatus World—A World unto Itself”] by one of their friends from New Mexico, David Dunn. And it basically is the history of electronic music and all of that.

AD: I should look at that again.

CH: And the introduction says, or Woody says maybe in his “Introduction,” that you have to appreciate the history of electronic music and the development of those instruments, because that's where video emerged from.

AD: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And I think they recognized it was the same technology at that time. I mean, Woody was my entrance into all this, the understanding that what we are dealing with was basically the language of analog electronics, and that we had to understand electronic signals. And in fact, before I even started studying with Steina (she says that I was her first student and Woody hadn’t even started teaching yet), I studied with Joel Chadabe, an electronic music composer when he was a guest in the Music Department, as I mentioned. He was excellent in explaining frequency and amplitude and analog systems in a simple and clear way -  so that when I started with the Vašulkas, I had that already a little bit of background in analog systems.

CH: You understood that.  

AD: Even when they talked about video synthesizers, of course even the term was adopted from audio. Even Nam June Paik was coming from music.  He came to Germany to study with Brendel. It's funny because even though Nam June was on the other side of the podium, coming from the art world and Fluxus, I also really felt close to him.

CH: Oh, interesting.

AD: Yeah. At that point, I was interested in the relationship of Koreans and shamanism to Mongolians and Ural Altaic languages, and he had a wealth of knowledge about Asian culture and history.

CH: That's interesting.

AD: Nam June was for me like a kind of Renaissance man, but Asian style. So he could read Chinese oracle bones, he was incredibly well educated, and spoke Japanese and Korean, of course, but also German. Yet when he spoke in German or English, they needed subtitles.

CH: You could never understand him, yeah.

AD: Yeah. But the playful Fluxus figure, making Zen jokes, that kind of thing, I knew another Nam June.

CH: Yeah, yeah.

AD: I was coming from La Monte, so he [Nam June] and Shigeko [Kubota] immediately adopted me since I was coming with a recommendation from old Fluxus friends. But there were a lot of other interesting figures such as Alfons Schilling. Woody and Steina brought him to Buffalo and then I knew him in New York and later when he was back in Vienna. I always found his work and his singular approach absolutely fascinating with its primary focus on visual perception. Also it was Weibel who in later years gave Alfons support in Vienna.

Alfons and Woody were very old friends from the ‘60s in New York. They worked together on a number of projects in the early years.  I was very glad that the recent Vašulka exhibition at the House of the Arts in Brno [Sums & Differences] coincided with an exhibition of Schilling (Brainscape, 2023) at the same time where evidence of their collaborations were shown.

I'm sorry, I'm rambling on into different characters and memory.

CH: It's also a big part of this texture. I mean, it really is part of this cultural texture. And, yeah, I'm thinking about the way that you present in your sculptural work these archive projects [The Great Archive], where you look through these different layers of names printed on translucent material, and the viewer’s focus goes back and forth between reading the specific names and sensing a more undifferentiated texture of a multitude of names. That's something that I really feel very strongly about, that these contexts are important, and the personal connections are revealing and were very important as well. And, how do you represent it and what form does it take if you're dealing with real people? Yeah, all of that's difficult.

Barbara [Lattanzi] and I have been talking about this as well, and especially about the period where we worked closely at Hallwalls in the 1980s-mid ‘90s. That’s another conversation, obviously, but I'm just confirming how important these contexts are, and that they are worth archiving and thinking about or re-engaging somehow. The Vašulkas’ long term concern with archiving is not only about preserving the work but also being about to understand the context within which the work and ideas emerged, were shared, and evolved.

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Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. Dreyblatt is the Vice-Director of the Visual Arts Section at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He was Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany from 2009 to 2022. Dreyblatt studied Media Art with Woody and Steina Vašulka and music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier. Dreyblatt's visual artworks create complex textual and spatial visualizations for memory. These projects, which reflect on such themes as recollection and the archive, include permanent installations, digital room projections, dynamic textual objects and multi-layered lenticular text panels and public art works.

Chris Hill (b. Cleveland, 1950) is a media curator and educator who has taught at CalArts (Los Angeles) and Antioch College (Ohio).  She curated Surveying the First Decade: Video Art & Alternative Media in the U.S., 1968-80 (Video Data Bank, 1996), published a series of oral histories about the parallel culture in Czechoslovakia before 1989 (Walking Trips in Czech Lands, 1997), and has written about early video history and artists whose work re-performs archives. She studied with the Vašulkas at the Center for Media Study, SUNY Buffalo in the early 1980s, and has published 1992 interviews with both Steina and Woody. Her recent project A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape (2023) is accessible online and through the Vašulka Kitchen Archive (House of Art, Brno, Czechia).