Vašulka Mediascape

The Brotherhood – “I entered the new, unwritten realm of epistemic space”

“EH: During the past few years you have started working with ideas involving theater, cybernetic actors, and things like that. How did you arrive at these ideas?

WV: For me, this whole idea covers the entire decade. I kind of departed – six, eight years ago – from my preoccupation with the single frame. Til then I had been searching for the phenomenology of video as well as investigating some kinds of narrative possibilities. I departed from those concerns and entered into an investigation of space. Redefining space. And that departure resulted from a crisis in my beliefs in iconic images and in the sort of sequential narrative system of video, inherited in principle from film. So, I lost my earlier interests, perhaps because I was disheartened by the speed with which this new magic stopped looking at itself and became just another subject of crude narrative exploits. Instead, I entered the new, unwritten realm of epistemic space, where a definition is once again possible – or at least, a non-traditional definition is possible.”

Erkki Huhtamo, “Interview with Woody Vašulka,” in catalog, The Brotherhood, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo (1998); link: https://www.vasulka.org/Woody/Brotherhood/PDFs/Cat_Brotherhood.pdf.