VASULKA VIDEO: PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC ART
5—7 March 2004
London Candid Arts Trust & University of Westminster

Since 1969, when they had their first access to primitive video equipment, the Vasulkas have conducted a dynamic exploration of the electro-magnetic image. Woody was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and trained as an engineer and filmmaker, Steina was born in Iceland in 1940 and became a professional musician. They married in 1964 and immigrated to America the following year. After seeing the ground-breaking TV as a Creative Medium exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, they devoted their activity to video, first documenting New York cultural events including jazz and rock concerts and underground performances using a Sony Portapak camera. Soon after, they began to experiment with using VCS3 and Buchla audio synthesisers to alter the electronic video signal, making their first image-processed tapes.

In 1971, together with Andy Mannick, the Vasulkas co-founded The Electronic Kitchen, an electronic laboratory for experimentation with sounds and images. The Kitchen soon became one of the artistic centres of New York, presenting screenings, performances and concerts ranging from the new music of La Monte Young to the new wave of Talking Heads, and it continues today as one of the city’s most prestigious multi-media art spaces.

Throughout the 1970s, the Vasulkas continued their tireless investigations into the phenomenology of video, with each tape produced being effectively a by-product of the dialogue between them and their machines. Steina and Woody did not create their images from video synthesisers; their unique approach involved the processing of previously recorded material through a series of modular units, frequently using the input of a separate electronic signal to control the effects.

Working in collaboration with creative engineers including George Brown, Bill Etra and Eric Siegel, they developed a new range of tools and devices with which they can further investigate the image. Their arsenal of analogue equipment contains the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, Dual Colorizer, Multikeyer, Programmer, Horizontal Drift Variable Clock and the Field Flip/Flop Switcher. Much of their work explores and exploits the similarity of the sound and image signals, producing a mesmerising range of synaesthetic video before the onset of the digital age.

In 1973, the Vasulkas moved to Buffalo to teach at the Media/Study Center, where they become part of a faculty including filmmakers and theorists Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits. The pair also began to work individually during this time. Steina embarked on the Machine Vision series, developing mechanical systems to control the camera, distancing it from the human viewpoint. Woody began to explore the digital realm, custom-designing the Digital Image Articulator. Both subsequently worked on interactive projects and large-scale installations, adding a sculptural or monumental element to their practice.

As pioneers of video art, Steina and Woody Vasulka stand alongside Nam June Paik, Peter Campus and Joan Jonas, with the Kitchen and their own studio as much a point of focus as the early activist groups Video Free America, Raindance and Guerilla Television and the innovative American television laboratories of NCET, WNET and WGBH. This weekend of events is the first opportunity in decades to see a substantial collection of the Vasulka’s early works in the UK, and a rare chance to hear the exuberant and vivacious duo discuss their work from a practical, rather than theoretical, point of view.

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PARTICIPATION
Friday 5 March 2004, at 7pm
London Candid Arts Trust

PARTICIPATION
Steina & Woody Vasulka, 1971, b/w, sound, 62 min

After acquiring their first video portapak, the Vasulkas, like other early video practitioners, took their camera to the streets to document the counterculture life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through their newly arrived eyes, the alternative movements of American culture presented unlimited possibilities. They later wrote of this time: “We were interested in certain decadent aspects of America, the phenomena of the time – underground rock and roll, homosexual theatre, and the rest of illegitimate culture. In the same way, we were curious about more puritanical concepts of art inspired by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. It seemed a strange and unified front – against the establishment.”

In Participation the Vasulkas present vignettes of marginal culture – rock concerts, gay theatre, and impromptu street theatre. These tapes embody the originality and spontaneity that characterise early experiments with video: Don Cherry eloquently playing his trumpet in Washington Square Park, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull performing at the Fillmore East, Andy Warhol’s gang arguing vehemently on the David Susskind Show about whether or not they are being exploited, and transvestites acting impromptu skits in makeshift theatres.

Participation evokes not only the utopian moment of the counterculture at a time of political upheaval but also the utopian moment of the video medium, when a sense of immediacy seemed to imbue every shot – a time when video practitioners like the Vasulkas were excitedly discovering the possibilities of electronic imaging.

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VASULKA VIDEO: PERFORMANCE
Saturday 6 March 2004, at 7:30pm
London University of Westminster

VIOLIN POWER: THE PERFORMANCE
Steina, 1992-present, live performance

“In 1991, after having experimentally interfaced my acoustic violin with a variable speed video cassette player, I bought a MIDI violin and a Pioneer Disk Player. Interfacing these instruments with a computer gave me an instant access to any frame of video on the disk as well as access to fast/slow and forward/backward movements. The initial software was written by Russ Gritzo and further developed and improved by Bill Heckel. Violin Power is a ongoing continuous project with an ever increasing ‘repertoire.’ So far I have made five videodisks and I change the program for every performance.” (Steina)

The ZETA Violin is a five-stringed electric violin with a MIDI output. The assignment, at the moment, is that stops on A and E string point to frame locations on the disk. The D and G strings control speed and direction and the C string is a master controller assigned to address segments on the disks. In another programming scheme, the C string controls which upper strings get assigned their function, as Steina experiments to make the performance more musically interesting.

“Steina’s project of manipulating and fusing the “real” and the electronic, sound and image, has in recent years taken the form of performances in which she returns to her roots as a musician. Transposing the strategies of her early Violin Power to a theatrical scale, Steina performs on a violin that digitally generates and controls a progression of projected images.” (Mondavi Arts Center)

VIOLIN POWER
Steina, 1970-78, b/w, sound, 10 mins
The first excerpt investigates the impact of varying pitches on the speed of the image. Steina’s body is invaded by a sort of double-exposure that quivers like the vibrato produced by a violin bow. In another sequence, Steina adds further components to an already complex interface. The sound modulations of the violin cause the viewpoints of two parallel cameras to alternate. Steina is first seen from behind, and then the bow’s movement seems to deflect the signal and a keyed-in image of Steina from the front appears. This effect is generated by the combined use of a keyer and an audio synthesiser (Harald Bode’s Phase Shifter) in closed circuit with the two cameras. Other excerpts feature effects generated by the Scan Processor developed by Steve Rutt and Bill Etra. The sound waves seem to cause ripples in the image’s surface, while the bow’s friction on the strings results in textured visual effects that evoke the violin’s timbre. Finally, the representation of the performing musician, the sounds produced, and the modulations in the video signal converge into a single luminous entity. The Vasulkas are deeply intrigued by the interface between audiotape and videotape; indeed, this interface is the focus of such pieces as Noisefields (1974) and Voice Windows (1986). Violin Power adds an additional dimension to this dialectic research by simultaneously showing the gestation of images, their mediation by instruments (violins, synthesizers), and the moment when these images crystallise on the monitor.

ORBITAL OBSESSIONS
Steinal, 1975-77/78, b/w, sound, 25 mins
Orbital Obsessions includes excerpts from Signifying Nothing (1975), Sound and Fury (1975), Switch! Monitor! Drift! (1976) and Snowed Tapes (1977). In these pieces, Steina focuses on time, space, and movement, and the means by which the mechanical can inform and engage with electronic media. Steina writes: “Ordinarily the camera view is associated with a human view point, paying attention to the human conditions around the camera. In this series the camera conforms to a mechanised decision-making of instruments… I am also paying attention to time accumulation, in a mix of real time with time inherited from each previous generation of pre-recorded and then re-taped segments.”

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VASULKA VIDEO: LECTURE
Sunday 7 March 2004, at 3pm
London Candid Arts Trust

WOODY VASULKA

Since the mid-1970s, Woody Vasulka’s work has focused on a rich articulation of the syntactical potential of electronic imaging. After producing a pioneering body of tapes in collaboration with Steina in the early 1970s, he has since undertaken a sophisticated exploration of the narrative and metaphorical meaning of technological images. Vasulka’s development of an expressive image-language has evolved from a rigorous deconstruction of the materiality of the electronic signal, through experiments with new technologies of digital manipulation, to the application of these imaging codes to narrative strategies.

The culmination of this investigation, Art of Memory (1987), is one of the major works in video. In this lushly textured, haunting essay, Vasulka applies a highly evolved imaging grammar to a metaphorical discourse of collective memory, history, and the meaning of recorded images – envisioned as a spectacular memory-theatre inscribed upon the landscape of the American Southwest.

In his early investigations of the vocabulary of such devices as the Digital Image Articulator, Vasulka emphasised the dialogue between artist and machine, as manifested in real-time creativity and process-oriented experimentation. Through digital manipulation, he continues to explore the malleability and objectification of the electronic image as a means of rendering a complex inventory of rhetorical devices. With the fantastical ‘electronic opera’ The Commission (1983), Vasulka began to apply these codes to the development of narrative and metaphorical strategies, an inquiry that has dominated his later work.

Woody Vasulka was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1937. He studied at the School of Industrial Engineering in Brno and the Academy of Performing Arts Faculty of Film and Television in Prague. With Steina, he has won numerous awards and grants; their collaborative works have been exhibited internationally. His individual works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, at festivals and institutions including the International Center of Photography, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York. Woody Vasulka lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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