In late 1960s New York, the Vašulkas—Woody, a Czech filmmaker, engineer and poet, and Steina, who grew up in Iceland and trained as a classical violinist—together discovered video to be a provocative new medium. Woody has said about this moment: “I went into working with video, which was completely undefined, completely free territory… And the community was very young, naive, fresh, new, strong, cooperative, no animosities, generous, kind of a welcoming tribe.” Working with the first ever portable video system (Sony), they soon began documenting the remarkable cultural scenes in the city’s clubs and underground theaters (Participation, 1969–71). But they eventually became more fascinated with video images that could be produced without a camera, images and sounds that explored and revealed the electronic material itself—voltages and waveforms. The Vašulkas became a seminal force in a community of video artists who shared an interest in technology and the emergence of a new media vocabulary. Many of the Vašulkas’ early works are intentionally “didactic” where they narrate exploration of phenomena produced by the new electronic instruments (Cantaloup, 1980; Artifacts, 1980). During this first decade, curator John Minkowsky wrote that the Vašulkas’ tapes “evidence the potentials of video to create new kinds of image experiences, while manifesting some underlying aspects of the medium which make these new types of imagery possible.”

In the 1970s, Steina initiated a body of work that she articulated as “machine vision.” These projects (including Allvision, 1978, 2006; Orbital Obsessions, 1977) were installations or tapes involving multiple cameras set onto moving elements like rotating arms or turntables, whose images were mixed often through luminance keying (a kind of electronic stencil) and that incorporated horizontally drifting video frames, a movement introduced by interfering with the timing of the framing mechanism. These multi-layered mediascapes anticipated later multi-channel landscape installations (The West, 1983; Mynd, 2006). Her ongoing Violin Power project began in the early 1970s as a performance where the sound output of the analog violin can be seen to modulate the video image. In the early 1990s she started playing a MIDI violin with strings programmed to access in real time clips of archived projects on a laser disk or computer.

Throughout the 1970s Woody’s work focused on an understanding of video as a time/energy object in both analog and digital technological realms. For him, a major creative and conceptual tool was the Rutt/Etra Scan Modulator with which he could manipulate the video framing mechanism and create a new type of electronic space. The Rutt/Etra also enabled him to re-direct brightness information into the horizontal video scan creating topographical-like images (C-Trend, 1974). Later, in the Art of Memory (1987), he used the Rutt/Etra to construct virtual mesa-like landscape forms coexisting with camera-produced images of the American Southwest in a project that presented landscape and film as mnemonic devices to reflect on 20th century conflicts and traumas. The Brotherhood, a series of installations produced in the 1990s, are constructed from military surplus and investigate machine systems that interact with each other and viewers.

When exploring the Media Works pathway, each project has a link to the work itself and a link to texts that culturally inform the work.