Regarding their work with electronic imaging the Vašulkas have stated: “The image is not there to deceive you but to reveal the means of making it… We always called what we were doing ‘dialogues with the tools.’ Sometimes we said that the tools are our teachers.” John Minkowsky, a video curator who worked closely with the Vašulkas during their time in Buffalo, offered insight into their work: “The video camera, the primary image source for other video artists, is simply another piece of hardware at the Vašulkas’ disposal, neither preventing a tendency toward abstraction nor forcing their work into representational or, especially, narrative modes. Rather, the real images gathered by the camera provide a concrete point of reference against which the radical nature of electronic image processing can be considered.”

One question that has frequently arisen in considering the structural investigations and art of the Vašulkas is whether one has to understand the electronic “materials” they manipulate in their projects—voltages, waveforms and frequencies for the analog work and eventually digital codes—in order to digest and understand their work. The Vašulkas’ response to that implicit question was a stated commitment to sharing knowledge about the electronic material and how the various independently developed instruments constructed and modified images. They often described their work, especially during the first decade of video art, as “didactic,” in that they recorded what might be seen as demos, along with explanations as they are shown manipulating the tools that are producing the images. When asked directly, Woody responded: “In this need to understand these tools, to begin with, I could replace an aesthetic appreciation of the images they produce with an appreciation of the process of understanding their structure. In fact, the process of understanding these structures became aesthetic to me.”

John Minkowsky has written insightfully about their early work: “The Vašulkas have described their process of working as more akin to that of the researcher than the artist (at least as the latter is conceived as the maker of previsioned aesthetic objects or expressive statements)… This is not to imply that their work is primarily didactic, for the tapes exhibit a sparse but meaningful use of symbolic imagery, a subtle wit and an immense beauty.”

The texts provided in the Dialogues with Tools pathway are intended as an introduction to the Vašulkas’ explorations with their electronic instruments, built by independent engineers, often with input from the Vašulkas. These personal (not mass-produced) tools, including the Multi-level Keyer and Flip/Flop Switcher (George Brown), Digital Image Articulator (Jeffrey Schier), and Rutt/Etra Scan Modulator (Steve Rutt and Bill Etra), have informed both of their respective bodies of work, as well as having inspired especially Woody’s theorizing and writing. The comprehensive exhibition Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt (Ars Electronica, Linz, 1992), curated by the Vašulkas, involved locating and rehabilitating many of the early instruments and curating bodies of work produced with them to be displayed and considered by a new generation of media artists and historians. The extensive catalog includes diagrams of many of the tools with comments by their inventors along with other essays and historical documents.