“Chris Hill: Yeah. When I visited them in 1992 and did an interview with them, and did some research on their work and their archive, they were so very generous. Steina said, ‘you can copy anything.’

Arnold Dreyblatt: They didn’t really care about ownership, actually they wanted the opposite, to propagate and share.

Chris Hill: And they had been working on the Eigenwelt exhibition [Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt, Ars Electronica, 1992] project at the time. I think it was more or less finished. But the other thing Woody was doing then was trying to figure out what file format would have archival value as the world was just becoming digital. And this was like ’92, so you couldn't even put anything moving on the internet at that point. Arnold Dreyblatt: That’s right. I confirm that. So he was in the ‘80s thinking about those issues. How do we keep this? How can it be somehow preserved what we did, and how can we show it later? And all those questions which are still, I mean, even though we can store all this material, as we know, the hard disks die, we don't know what format we're going to have, what technology. It's actually, in some ways, even more of a nightmare. I think they were very early in understanding that digital code meant there was no medium anymore.”

Chris Hill & Arnold Dreyblatt, “Interview with Arnold Dreyblatt regarding Steina and Woody Vašulka and their archiving commitments and practices,” (2024)

link: https://vkba.vasulkakitchen.org/cs/interview-with-arnold-dreyblatt