The Vašulkas arrived together in New York in 1965 where their work with video art emerged at a moment of radical cultural aspirations and social change. The new portable Sony video camera and recorder introduced a time-based medium that shared some lens-based capacities with film but, as an electronic medium, also shared the basic physical material of voltages and frequencies with electronic sound. Contemporary artists working in all mediums at this time pursued aesthetic investigations into the fundamental nature of their materials, whether working with film, strips of celluloid organized as frames, or interfacing various waveform generators and other image processing instruments with video equipment. New York was a crucible for diverse inquiries into the video medium. Radical Software (1970–74), published by the Raindance collective, suggested on the masthead of its first issue that video was a radical cultural tool and “unless we design and implement alternative information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, our alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.”

The Vašulkas and their “tribe” of fellow video artists and electronic instrument designers celebrated their creation of new perceptual experiences and articulated their deep commitment to building a new consciousness that would include an expanded electronic media literacy. Woody remarked: “The didactic purpose involved is to enable the principles of time-energy construction to become common knowledge, as a primary conceptual and technological tool of our evolving electronic society.”

At the end of the 1970s major media art discourses generally shifted away from structural investigations such as the Vašulkas’ projects, with many artists re-embracing forms of narrative and emerging post-modernism, steering media arts in diverse experimental directions. The once robust structural discussion centered on the video signal was sustained, but within a narrower cultural niche. In the mid-1990s the shift from analog to digital technologies also saw the emergence of the internet as a radical international public space.

Many of the Vašulkas’ aesthetic preoccupations and instruments continued to evolve into the coming decades. By the 1980s the work of Steina and Woody, while still sharing tools and ideas, developed into distinct idioms. Steina’s ongoing body of work included the ever changing performances of Violin Power, and also featured multi-channel, multi-screen installations usually inspired by landscapes of Iceland and the American Southwest. Woody’s work shifted toward applying his personal electronic aesthetic vocabulary to narrative elements, and in the 1990s he reconfigured military salvage into interactive machine installations.

In more recent decades the Vašulkas’ work also included deeply researched curatorial projects, Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt (1992) and MindFrames (2006), exhibitions that re-presented to the next generation the revelatory media aesthetics and critical inquiries of early electronic researchers and structural film and video makers.