Vašulka Mediascape

The “unity of materials” in expressing both sound and image electronically

CH: “One thing in particular about your work, especially in the 1970s, is its examination of sound and image, not as equivalences, but in the same terms, common units, fundamentals from which to build a vocabulary perhaps … ”

Woody: “All the genres that were based on tradition of the presentation of light like the Lumina, or Scriabin and all his acoustic and optical interests, and the audio-visual aesthetic that the French would dream of, were never realized. There is no historical audio-visual genre … The unity of materials as we called it. What we were pointing to was the simple fact that sound could influence picture and both are defined simply by frequency, or voltage change in time in a waveform organization. So the organizing principle of this new material, voltages and frequencies, was in a unified code under this new synthetic possibility.

Chris Hill, “Interview with Woody Vašulka” (1992), in The Squealer, Buffalo, NY (1995); link: https://vasulka.org/archive/4-25/Squealer(5097).pdf.