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
1965 in New York City
1970 in Buffalo, New York
1980 in Santa Fe, New Mexico
1990
2000
2010
2020

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”
“… and I said that it is maybe time to pay a tribute to what I denied always in my work”
“Earthly forms and spiritual shadows”
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
NYC in late 1960s — a “huge educational experience”
The mission was transmission of knowledge
Restructuring society through technology
Videotaping NYC performers who asked “what is video?” “what is tape?”
“What is it? And how did it begin? And what are its predecessors?”
“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