Vašulka Mediascape

Debate – whether Woody’s work is naturalistic or formalist

Woody: “To extend this awareness of tools to include computers was a very natural or, perhaps, naturalistic step. Sometimes, I have this inner debate about whether my work is basically naturalistic or basically formalistic. I see those two as contradictory. The formalist is a person who insists on structure being supreme, and who will organize all his resources and all his conceptual abilities to structure a product. I’d rather believe that I’m a naturalist, who simply goes and finds another evolutionary tool and examines it, and in the process of examining it creates certain structures. But this tool-examination, or this found-object examination, is the pathway by which I naturally came to computers. In the last five years, in terms of cost and accessibility, it has become possible for me to have these tools in my own environment, and to slowly learn how to operate them. I find them more demanding, compared to video tools … Inevitably, my work has become team-like.”

Woody Vašulka & Charles Hagen, “A Syntax of Binary Images,” in Afterimage, Rochester, NY (1978); link: https://archive.org/details/ETC0400/A%20Syntax%20of%20Binary%20Images%20-%20republished%202008/page/31/mode/2up.