“In the early seventies, accomplished structural/materialist film and video artists Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Woody and Steina Vašulka signed on with the Center for Media Study (CMS) at SUNY Buffalo. Their common orientation was the investigation of the material properties of film and video. Rather than simply, and invisibly, employing the codes embedded in the technology and conventional practices of media production — formations normally used to structure visual and aural information and produce a realist illusion — they reflexively turned their attention to the codes and technical materials themselves … More than simply examining, the Media Study artists and students were pushing media machinery toward new expressions. The Vašulkas were engaged in "dialogues with tools," and their path-breaking experiments with image processing (colorizing, keying, and otherwise transforming the video image) were intended to discover images which their minds could not preconceive. The utopian goal was to expand the perceptual and conceptual range of viewers whose consciousness had been limited by realist codes and machinery.”