“Oddly enough, Woody’s passion for video wasn’t about creating avant-garde art. He was interested only in examining, like a scientist, what he called ‘the new material.’ He wanted to be the one who gave the world ‘a structural understanding’ of the video signal as a platform for future art.”

“Using the video synthesizers and image processors that were the user-built folk instruments of electronic culture, Woody exhaustively explored, demonstrated and categorized the ‘primitives’ of electronic imaging. The visual manifestations of this research he called ‘artifacts’ rather than art. But the material was so hypnotically beautiful that almost everyone else called it art–and it lived as art in the art world. Thus, a man who claimed to be uninterested in an art career became one of the seminal figures in the history of video art.”

“Steina, meanwhile, pursued two related paths. In a series called Violin Power, which began in the mid-70s, she ‘performed’ video by using her violin to control real-time image processing. Later, she controlled laser discs with her violin in live performances. She continues to refine both techniques today. Her other body of work, called Machine Vision, involved robotic camera controls that removed human intentionality from the camera’s point of view.”