Steina and Woody Vasulka

Woody Vasulka (left)
Steina Vasulka (right)

Steina Vasulka (born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir in 1940)^[1] and Woody Vasulka (born Bohuslav Vašulka on 20 January 1937^[2] – 20 December 2019^[3]) are early pioneers of video art, and have been producing work since the early 1960s.^[4] The couple met in the early 1960s and moved to New York City in 1965, where they began showing video art at the Whitney Museum and founded The Kitchen in 1971. Steina and Woody both became Guggenheim fellows: Steina in 1976, and Woody in 1979.^[1]

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>>Woody: When you see, this sort, this basically has something to do with eko morphology. It can, takes an ordinary object and imprints different, kind of, vision. Uh, Steina, I need your little help here. >>Woody: My name is Woody Vasulka >>Steina: There, You got it. Uh, and my name is Steina Vasulka. >>Woody: Let's see I was a poet, then I was a filmmaker, then I was a videomaker, then I don't call myself that because now I use the computer. >>Steina: If you are in video, you started out as video, or film, before, or whatever. And then you go through this endless evolution of the equipment. So, you end up being what, a digital artist? >>Woody: People ask me, what do you do? I never say Eich bin en coonsler (I am an arist). This is just a crazy sort of statement to make. >>Steina: We always say we do make enough video artists. Other people can call us artists, but we cannot. It's a very old European opinion, that you cannot self-nominate to be an artist. So, I hope, uh, after all those years, I kind of am. But, if I'm not that's also O.K. >>Woody: Neither of us campaigned, or do, kind of, uh, captures. None of that. But, she could use the tones, like we had a synthesizer, audio synthesizer, and she immediately, after we entered this idea that the sound synthesizer can drive image. That's her light motif. >>Steina: Yeah, but I'm glad you used the word sound. You could also say audio, sound or audio. It's not music. See, we don't use music. >>Steina: In order to be able to distort the image this way, I had to clean it up, filter it into a sine wave, and then, I can, I could make it two complex sine wave, inverted sine wave. Looks a lot like (? scan). It is the sound of my bowing that is distorting the picture. >>Woody: I'm kind of an opposite. I take sound out of the image, because these two things become to us, both, the building material. This is the material of electronic sound and image. >>Woody: media is the same language for all of us. It has a different code, and, we, we share the code. And suddenly we have these visual and acoustic and other codes that we communicate easily. >>Steina: You say code, you use the word code, as your art material, and I am more inclined to use the word signal, for my art material. And, it comes out of our background. >>Steina: You were more into engineering and building things and then being in the film, and I come out of music, where it is always, always a signal. >>Steina: In our work, which is experimentation with electronic images, we came to the point of wanting to explore computer images. And in the summer of 1978, we decided to build a digital image tool. >>Woody: 'Cause that time, there were some computers, but they were not structural. You couldn't program them the way, you , we wanted. So, we had to build the whole machine to do it. >>Woody: I had to physically do it. So, this was my job, and this was first machine that revealed to us how to create and establish the language. >>Steina: And this is the device. Its computer controlled, operated through a keyboard. >>Steina: This is, such a, demo of the magic of, uh, the image. To be able to change the shape and reshape it and all those things. It doesn't have to be in a frame. See, I'm still there in the picture. >>Woody: The whole confinement of the frame is totally useless, and it's totally obsolete. And, it gave me, actually, a kick into this whole new way of thinking, cause the frame is the whole narrative system of the narrative content, see. Once we eliminate that, then we could actually work in a spacial syntax. But that's such a big thing to define, that we are still just stumbling over this. But, I mean, if I would have another life, this is where I would go. >>It just, it's just a great victory for me to free the image out of the frame. >>Woody: It almost has its own strategy. That's why I like the system, like you can just put yourself in the system that is completely, kind of, outside of existence. But I go into this medium, and that medium I negotiate and the medium says this time, it's time for this step. And I obey. >>Woody: There's no longer order of the nature and life, and you are there but not there. It's not you, actually, but it is you. >>Woody: People sometimes call it art, sometimes not. >>Steina: It can be art, yeah. It depends on what you do with it. That's when it can become an art, when you go away from just staring at yourself. Although, the narcisstic form is a very beautiful one. >>Woody: But we are trying to put a language on it, and actually get the control. Unfortunately, we, as humans cannot live out of control, because we don't know what it means. >>Steina: You know, it's no fun to go and say today I'm going to make a masterpiece. That is of no interest to me. But, uh, today I am going to play with the material, and see what is offered. That interests me.

Early life and education

Steina Vasulka was born in Reykjavík, Iceland and trained as a classical musician and violinist and was a member of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Steina received a scholarship at the Prague Conservatory in 1959.

Woody Vasulka was born in Brno, now in the Czech Republic and trained as an engineer before studying television and film production at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. While pursuing his studies in the fifties, Woody Vasulka wrote poetry and produced short films. The pair met in Prague in the early 1960s, where Woody introduced video to Steina.^[5]

New York / The Kitchen

For the first few years following their relocation to in New York, the Vasulkas were not involved with the local art scene; Steina continued to practice as a violinist and Woody began making independent documentaries and edited industrial films at Harvey Lloyd Productions.^[6]^[7] In 1967, at the request of architects Woods and Ramirez, Woody collaborated on developing films designed for a multi-screen environment to be shown in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1968, Woody conducted his first experiments with images made with electronics and put aside the cinematographic form in favor of video. Steina was experimenting with video at the same time as Woody, with equipment that the couple had borrowed from Lloyd. Over time, the Vasulkas became more closely involved with the artistic communities around them and the emerging fascination with video and new-media, and grew more dedicated to their developing video art practice until they made it their shared full-time occupation.^[8]

On December 31, 1969 and January 1, 1970 Woody Valsulka video recorded Jimi Hendrix performing with Band of Gypsys at the Fillmore East in NYC. The recordings are included on a DVD included in a CD release of the concerts. (Source: Live at the Fillmore DVD released 1999, released again 2012)

In 1971, the Vasulkas founded The Kitchen, a multi-use media theater located in the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center in Grand Central Hotel, Greenwich Village, in the interest of cultivating new-media art in an inclusive, comprehensive, and un-administrative context. Under the direction of Dimitri Devyatkin, and with help from Andy Mannik, Sia and Michael Tschudin, Rhys Chatham, and Shridhar Bapat, the space received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and expanded its programming, which was foregrounded by video and electronic media performance and would come to include new music programming under the direction of Rhys Chatham.^[9] The Kitchen would relocate following the collapse of the Mercer Arts Centre, but maintain its mission.

The Kitchen was valuable space for a number of music, performance, and media artists in New York who at the time did not feel welcome in commercial galleries or the mainstream art-world.^[10]^[11] The Vasulkas' programming for The Kitchen provided the space to a number video artists who would become prominent, including Joan Jonas, Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci, Mary Lucier, Dara Birnbaum, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill.^[12]

Work

The work that the Vasulkas presented at The Kitchen's original Greenwich Village location, which amounted to a handful of performances and showings each month, included a range of live documentary and experimental videos, live video performances, live video processing, media installations, and “experiments in perception.”^[13]

The Vasulkas' work at this time was colored by the artists' interest in negotiating terms like "space" in the context of video and what Yvonne Spielman calls video's "image object." The Vasulkas' wide exploration of video in this ontological regard led to apparent contrast, such as that between the documentary-style Participation series involving footage of real-life performances (occurring in the space in front of and around the video camera), and works like Caligrams, in which the Vasulkas use hardware devices such as scan processors, video sequencers, and multikeyers to "play" or perform with video like a musical instrument, and in a different kind of space.

In 1974, The Vasulkas moved to Buffalo, New York to pursue a faculty position at the State University of New York's Department of Media Studies, though they would maintain involvement with The Kitchen and its programming. Though Steina and Woody had worked outside their duo before, their practices diverged to a greater extent following this relocation. Woody's practice became more focused on digital image manipulation and the employment of tools like the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer (Bill Etra, a co-creator of this device, showed frequently at the Kitchen during the Vasulkas' tenure). Steina's practice centered around environmental, mechanical, and physical relationships between body, video, and camera, beginning with a late-1970s series of moving-camera environments titled All Vision and Machine Vision which were shown, in part, at The Kitchen.

The Vasulkas have collaborated with Harald Bode (posthumously).^[14]

The Vasulka Chamber

In 2014, The National Gallery of Iceland opened the Vasulka Chamber, a collaboration between the museum and the artist couple. They donated a substantial amount of their digital archive to the museum and it is the Chamber's aim to preserve the legacy and collection of the artists.^[15]

The Vasulka Archive

In 2016 the Vašulka Kitchen Brno (VKB) was established in Brno in The Czech Republic, for research, artistic experiment and informal education in the field of new media art. It consists of the archive of Woody and Steina Vašulkas’ work and a permanent exhibition of their selected works.^[16]

Gallery representation

The Vasulkas are represented by commercial art gallery BERG Contemporary.^[17]^[18]

Selected works

Complete and existing videotapes by Steina and Woody Vasulka include:^[19]

1969–71

Participation, 60 min., b/w

1970

Adagio, 10 min., color
Calligrams, 12 min., b/w
Decay #1, 7 min., color
Decay #2, 7 min., b/w
Don Cherry, 12 min., b/w (in collaboration with Elaine Milosh)
Evolution, 16 min
Interface, 3:30 min., b/w
Jackie Curtis' First Television Special, 45 min., b/w
Sexmachine, 6 min., b/w
Sketches, 27 min., b/w
Tissues, 6min., b/w

1970-78

Violin Power, video, 10:04 min., b/w, sound (by Steina Vasulka) ^[20]

1971

Black Sunrise, 21 min., color
Contrapoint, 3 min., b/w
Discs, 6 min., b/w
Elements, 9 min., color
Keysnow, 12 min., color
Shapes, 13 min., b/w
Swan Lake, 7 min., b/w

1972

Distant Activities, 6 min., color
Soundprints, endless loops, color
Spaces 1, 15 min., b/w
Spaces 2, 15 min., b/w

1973

Golden Voyage, 28 min., color
Home, 16 min., color
Vocabulary, 5 min., color

1974

1-2-3-4, 8 min., color
Heraldic View, 5 min., color
Noisefields, 13 min., color
Solo For 3, 5 min., color
Soundgated Images, 10 min., color
Soundsize, 5 min., color
Telc, 5 min., color

1979

Six Programs for Television: Matrix, Vocabulary, Transformations, Object, Steina, Digital Images, 174 min., total (29 min. each), color

1981

In Search of the Castle, 12 min., color
Progeny, 19 min., color (in collaboration with Bradford Smith)

1983

The West, color

1984

Pariah, color

1989

In the Land of the Elevator Girls, color

References

^ ^a ^b Steina & Woody Vasulka Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest
^ Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial (Dec 22, 1979). "Reports of the President and the Treasurer". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved Dec 22, 2019 – via Google Books.
^ Greenberger, Alex (Dec 21, 2019). "Woody Vasulka, Imaginative Filmmaker Who Inspired Generations of Video Artists, Is Dead at 82". Retrieved Dec 22, 2019.
^ "Steina and Woody Vasulka fonds : Steina and Woody Vasulka fonds". www.fondation-langlois.org. Retrieved Dec 22, 2019.
^ Vasulka, Steina (1995). "My Love Affair with Art: Video and Installation Work". Leonardo. 28 (1): 15–18. doi:10.2307/1576147. JSTOR 1576147. S2CID 193245143.
^ "Modular video matrix" (PDF). Radical Software. 2 (5): 18–19. Winter 1973. Retrieved 11 December 2022. Video and Environment
^ "Trend". The New Yorker. 6 December 1969. Retrieved 11 December 2022.
^ "Notes Toward a History of Image-processed Video – Steina and Woody Vasulka" (PDF). Afterimage: 12–17. December 1983.
^ "The Kitchen" (PDF). Vasulka.org.
^ "History and Purpose" (PDF). Vasulka.org.
^ "Open Circuits: The New Video Abstractionists". Vasulka.org.
^ "Archive – 1970s". The Kitchen.
^ "Electric Arts Intermix, Inc" (PDF). Vasulka.org.
^ "Various - Bode Sound Project". Discogs. Retrieved Dec 22, 2019.
^ "Vasulka Chamber".
^ "Vašulka Kitchen Brno". vasulkakitchen.org. Vašulka Kitchen Brno. Retrieved 2019-09-26.
^ "Berg Contemporary".
^ "Berg Contemporary".
^ Riley, Robert R. (1996). Machine Media. San Francisco, California: San Francisco Museum of Art. p. 76.
^ "Online Gallery - Watch This! Revelations in Media Art | Smithsonian American Art Museum". americanart.si.edu. Retrieved 2015-07-25.

Furlong, Linda (1985). "Tracking Video Art: "Image Processing" as a Genre". Art Journal. 45 (3): 233–237. doi:10.1080/00043249.1985.10792303.
Dietrich, Frank (1987). "The Computer: A Tool for Thought-Experiments". Leonardo. 20 (4): 315–325. doi:10.2307/1578526. JSTOR 1578526. S2CID 96440151.

External links

Steina Vasulka at IMDb
Woody Vasulka at IMDb
Vasulkas' web-presence
Steina and Woody Vasulka in the Video Data Bank
Steina and Woody Vasulka, Mediateca Media Art Space
Video Out, documentary about VJing's roots in video out and influence of Vasulkas. Features interview with Steina Vasulka.
Steina and Woody Vasulka portfolio at Imai
Tools Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art Chap. IV.1.2 Video Synthesizers.www.listasafn.is
Switch! Monitor! Drift! (3:45) (1976) on UbuWeb
The Kitchen: Steina and Woody Vasulka

Video art

Artists

This page was last edited on 18 July 2023, at 10:44

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