While the Vašulkas may be best known for their electronic media art work spanning more than five decades, much of their body of work also included maintaining extensive personal archives eventually shared with the public, developing an artist-run space at a time of intensive experimentation in time-based arts, publishing speculation on an emerging vocabulary about time/energy construction, and producing major curatorial projects focused on work by communities of artist-educators and artist-inventors.

The Vašulkas’ commitment to the transmission of cultural knowledge speaks to their sense of the importance of the larger media art and technology project that inspired their early investigations. Woody described the late 1960s historical moment: “This was our fate, to bring those processes and take them from the technological environment and to bring them closer to art, from the technological to the aesthetic… and we volunteered for this because we found it most interesting.” Their extensive archives have been accessible in various online projects (e.g. vasulka.org) as well as being now permanently housed at the Vašulka Chamber (Reykjavik) and the Vašulka Kitchen Archive (Brno).

The Vašulkas’ dissemination of cultural information has taken various forms. During the intensive evolution of video art and notions about the democratization of media in New York the Vašulkas co-founded The Kitchen (1971), an artist-run space where artists could present exploratory electronic media works and immersive environments, music, dance and performance. About The Kitchen and this cultural moment, Woody has said: “There was almost a religion about disseminating information...it was an activist period. Everyone was trying to disclose the utmost secrets of systems, systems thinking and performance.”

Two critical mid-career curatorial efforts reconstructed the contributions of important early media arts communities. Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt, an exhibition at Ars Electronica (Linz, 1992) revived early instruments (video synthesizers, modified keyers, analog tools with early digital capacity), made by independent engineers working with artists, along with tapes from early experimentation by the Vašulkas and their “tribe,” an “underground technological community” according to Woody’s curatorial statement (1992). MindFrames at the ZKM (co-curated with Peter Weibel, Karlsruhe, 2006, accompanied by an 800+ page catalog, Buffalo Heads, 2008) brought together two decades of media art and writing by seven media artists/theorists and educators, including the Vašulkas, who had worked together in the first university media arts program, the Center for Media Study in Buffalo, New York. Video curator John Minkowsky wrote that MindFrames “represented an exhaustive recognition of the languages and media experimentations that allowed the birth of what is now called media art.” Woody and Steina’s curatorial efforts in these two exhibitions re-focused media art work, electronic instruments, documentation, critical commentary and media theory for a new generation of media artists, historians, and the public.