About the Project

A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape

Created by Chris Hill with Lloyd Dunn (programming and design)
Key:
Steina’s words
Woody’s words
Key quotation
Timeline
Intro to Dialogues with Tools
Intro to the Vasulkas’ Media Works
Intro to Media Art Culture
Intro to Transmission of Cultural Knowledge
1965 in New York City
1970 in Buffalo, New York
1980 in Santa Fe, New Mexico
1990
2000
2010
2020

Tools

Early videomakers formed “tribes” to share equipment
Feedback, no need for camera – a voltage, a frequency could create an image
Evolution of tools, mutual interchangeability of sound and image
Dialogues with tools
Vašulkas’ tools included video synthesizers, colorizer and keyers, horizontal drift
“In the early 1970s the word ‘digital’ was hardly ever used in our circles”
Special tools like Flip/Flop Switcher and Multikeyer
Discovery that video had frames
“Fortunately the material has a way of confronting you…”
Independence of many electronic tool designers in 1970s
How the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor reorganizes the raster or video frame
“When setting up a system you can simply observe it … adjust it.”
Rutt/Etra was a tool that challenged filmic truth
Digital Image Articulator – “a new area was being born which required a new language”
Recognition of a time/energy object
Eigenwelt: Thanking inventors who dug up schematics, dormant documents, and resuscitating their own machines for exhibition
Steina at STEIM and development of Image/ine software
MindFrames – technical considerations for a 2006 museum media arts exhibition

Works

Woody Vašulka, films made 1960-1965
Woody & Steina Vašulka, Participation (1969-71, 62:00)
Steina. Violin Power (1969-1978) [with acoustic violin]
Woody Vašulka, Vocabulary (1973, 4:30)
Woody Vašulka, C-Trend (1974, 9:45)
Steina, Orbital Obsessions (1977, 24:30)/includes Switch! Monitor! Drift! (1976), see especially 13:00-18:30)
Steina, Allvision, various installation versions (1976-2006)
Steina & Woody Vašulka, Vašulka Video: Steina (1978, 28:50)
Steina & Woody Vašulka, Vašulka Video: Transformations (1978, 28:50)
Steina, Cantaloup (1980, 22:50)
Woody Vašulka, Artifacts, 1980, 22:50
Steina, The West, installation (1983)
Steina, Lilith (1987, 9:15)
Woody Vašulka, Art of Memory (1987, 36:00)
Steina, Violin Power (1991-present, with MIDI violin)
Woody Vašulka, The Brotherhood (1990-1998), 6 opto/electro/mechanical installations titled Translocations, Theater of Hybrid Automata, Friendly Fire, Stealth, Scribe, and The Maiden
Steina, Mynd, installation (6 channels, 2000)

Media

Steina – self-education in Iceland, scholarship to study music in Prague
New York in late 1960s – a “luxury” … artists and audiences found each other
Woody’s shift from film to video; hallucinogens, “transformations of perception”
Video “was a free medium” … and the community “kind of a welcoming tribe”
Possibility of generating images by non-photographic means
Vašulkas’ experience in “cultural playgrounds of New York”
Our fate – to take processes from the technological to the aesthetic
The “unity of materials” in expressing both sound and image electronically
From Perception to the Kitchen
Steina – “creates polyphonic structures, multichannel compositions”
Ten tableaux illustrate “waveform codes in electronic imaging”
Reflecting on “this new material,” and perhaps “new models of consciousness”
Education about wave form primitives “most powerful experience of this period”
The development of a fundamental electronic imaging lexicon
Vašulkas’ works “evidence the potentials of video to create new kinds of image experiences”
Tools as colleagues – “[they] have taught me more … than I’ve taught them”
Creating an electronic image is “building an image in time,” “an architectural construction”
He wanted to give the world “a structural understanding” of the video signal
Debate – whether Woody’s work is naturalistic or formalist
“Always been a split between those who understood [the computer] and those who did not”
Using code we could assemble … “structures, no longer related to outside world”
“Earthly forms and spiritual shadows”
“… and I said that it is maybe time to pay a tribute to what I denied always in my work”
Art of Memory: “its material [is] the black-and-white photographic and film images of historic events of the first half of the 20th century”
Vašulka work at juncture of modernism and postmodernism
Eigenwelt: “First video instruments inspired by the architecture of audio instruments”
Eigenwelt: “It is predominantly the process which is on exhibit”
Eigenwelt: Future of “the tribe that worshipped electricity”
The Brotherhood – “I entered the new, unwritten realm of epistemic space”
Brotherhood used recycled industrial machines from Los Alamos and elsewhere
“The role of the gallery has come under revision in my mind”
A move “from cinematic space … to video space … to computer-generated space …”
“An investigation into the ancient sciences of navigation and calibration”
“Exposing the narrative of artificial intelligence”
“to amplify the mind of its creator: the male idea of the machine’s destructive power”
MindFrames: “Sensorially stimulating, conceptually provocative … a paradigm to be adapted elsewhere”
MindFrames exhibition featured Buffalo’s Media Study faculty (1973-1990)
Each document in MindFrames “located in a network of relations”
Woody Vašulka (1937-2019), obituary
Recent documentary films about the Vasulkas, media art history

Archive

A duty to collect and archive contextual materials
The mission was transmission of knowledge
NYC in late 1960s — a “huge educational experience”
Restructuring society through technology
“What is it? And how did it begin? And what are its predecessors?”
Videotaping NYC performers who asked “what is video?” “what is tape?”
“Almost religion about disseminating information”
Vašulkas archiving — documenting electronic culture was their destiny
Woody Vašulka & Scott Nygren — “Didactic Video: Organizational Models of the Electronic Image,” (1975) — examining the “light/code interface”
Structural/materialist film and video artists at SUNY Buffalo in 1970-80s
Thriving cultural scene in 1970-80s in Buffalo, NY
Publication: Woody Vašulka & Charles Hagen, “A Syntax of Binary Images,” (1978) — “I want to transform computer knowledge into … people-utilized material”
Post-World War II European landscape & American Southwest — “all these dead war machines”
“The archival discussion is really about access”
“They didn’t really care about ownership...[rather] to propagate and share”
Steina re-performing a personal archive in Violin Power
Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt/ Pioneers of Electronic Art, exhibition, Steina & Woody Vašulka, curators, Ars Electronica, Linz (1992) — exhibition of early electronic imaging tools, histories
“The urge to share unique discoveries”
Art and Science Laboratory, Santa Fe, New Mexico — “a new creative domain”
MindFrames technical architecture: “Way ahead of its time”
MindFrames, exhibition, Woody Vašulka & Peter Weibel, curators, ZKM, Karlsruhe, (2006) — “intoxicating … a curatorial coup”
“Faculty members were not only artists but also theorists”
Many investigations into archiving media arts and ephemera
Vašulkas’ ongoing commitments to archiving
In archiving Vašulka work, Woody insisted on a “curriculum”
Additional sites to find parts of the Vašulka archive, works in distribution, and videographies, bibliographies and exhibition records
Vašulkas’ livelong commitment to archiving, vasulka.org