Vašulka Mediascape
Reflecting on “this new material,” and perhaps “new models of consciousness”
“I have reached a certain point at which I need to reflect on this new material, which offers itself for the construction of, perhaps, truly new models of consciousness … You will recall, my roots are in film, and I was educated in narrative and filmic syntax. And now I find myself in a different world, having quite different tools to work with. Furthermore, I find myself in a situation, whereby I have had to produce the visual material as artifacts, initially as the subject of my studies, in order to observe them. What this means is that I spend most of my time building specific analytic instruments of rare properties, which enables me to look at this structural phenomenology rather than dwell on the protagonists of the esthetic, synthetic tools. And then, I think that, perhaps, we all have to use our tools to learn about ourselves.”
Woody Vašulka, “Five Lectures” (1976), in Buffalo Heads, Woody Vašulka & Peter Weibel, eds, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008).