Chris Hill

This map is intended as a navigational tool for the Vašulka Kitchen Archive, offering multiple pathways to investigate the media art work, cultural projects, and archive of Steina and Woody Vašulka (Steinnum Briem Bjarnadottir, b. 1940; and Bohuslav “Woody” Vašulka, 1937–2019). The Vašulkas’ research and art are foundational to the understanding of media art history and especially electronic media art that evolved in the intense cultural climate of the late 1960s. Steina and Woody arrived in New York City from Europe in 1965 and, following the introduction of the light-weight analog (Sony) Portapak (late 1960s), shared their technological explorations and a visionary commitment to the medium of video with other early practitioners. About this period, when many artists were bound up with structural investigations of materials, both Woody and Steina have remarked upon two critical discoveries they made working with video—that images could be produced without a camera, and that electronic sounds and images were produced by the same materials (voltages and frequencies).

The transmission of knowledge with contemporary colleagues and over time has been an additional component of the Vašulkas’ lifelong project. This resolution has taken the form of publishing insights into the evolving “vocabulary” of electronic media, teaching, curating two major exhibitions, and creating extensive personal archives. A friend and fellow media theorist, Gene Youngblood, wrote in 2000 about the Vašulka archive, much of which is housed now in the Vašulka Kitchen Archive in Brno: “What distinguished this archive is the remarkable breadth of its technological and cultural purview. On the one hand, it’s evidence of one of the most inspiring investigations into the nature of a medium in the history of any art form. At the same time, it documents a ferment of activity across a constellation of avant-garde and culture.”

This Navigational Tool is essentially a curatorial project in a hypertext environment where a visitor can link to sixteen media art works by the Vašulkas, structured in parallel with text selections (from interviews, catalog essays, publications) intended to provide a cultural context informing the work. Many of the selections are from interviews with the Vašulkas and encourage the viewer to hear directly their voices and observations as well as to be refreshed by their inspired conversations with fellow cultural travelers. This map is meant to be a guide to important lines of inquiry for those who have not previously encountered the Vašulkas’ work as well as for those whose curiosity might develop into a longer walk through this remarkable cultural territory. This Navigational Tool is intended to be generative as more of the Vašulka Kitchen Archive comes online and more of the contextualizing material can be directly linked.

Gene Youngblood observed: “The Vašulkas brought a European respect for history and for intellectual traditions to the emerging electronic culture.” Woody remarked: “Both of our upbringings are socialist and concerned with knowledge.” This map is offered by someone who came to the Vašulkas’ work first as their student and later a curator, and who shares their belief in the importance of expanded media literacies for art audiences as well as contemporary publics, whose lives are inextricably bound with electronic media and its ever evolving dialects.