Steina Vasulka

Películas

The Vasulka Effect
Herself
The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.
Funtime at the Vasulkas
A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate image algorithms and convert them to an analog signal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O’Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avantgarde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.
Funtime at the Vasulkas
Camera Operator
A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate image algorithms and convert them to an analog signal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O’Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avantgarde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.
Funtime at the Vasulkas
Director
A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate image algorithms and convert them to an analog signal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O’Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avantgarde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.
Music in the Afternoon
Self
Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 to 1979.
Music in the Afternoon
Director
Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 to 1979.
Warp
Director
In Warp, Steina makes use of her two favourite features of the Image/ine software, written by Tom Demeyer. The first feature – ‘warp’ – is a time delay software, which scans one line at the time, leaving the rest of the image motionless. With the second feature – ‘slit scan’ – a point or line in a continuously moving image is captured and streamed forward.
Binary Lives
Herself
A short documentary on the life and art of Steina and Woody Vasulka, produced in 1996. Features interviews, excerpts from their older films and a glimpse into their 90's output.
In the Land of the Elevator Girls
Director
Lilith
Director
Against a field of swaying and halting yellow vegetation, another processed field: the image of the eponymous subject (performed by painter Doris Cross) riles and emits unintelligibly to the viewer. Conjuring the mystical biblical character Lilith, Steina's video layers both sound and image to produce an ever-shifting, frustrated presence.
Voice Windows
Director
The Commission
Camera Operator
This work is Woody's first entry into the narrative sphere, whereby the "story" is continually undermined with the aid of various anti-narrative strategies: In each of the eleven segments of this "electronic opera", different effects are used. Fascinated with the remarkable personality of infamous violinist Niccola Paganini and his complicated relationship to Hector Berlioz (played by artists Ernie Gusella and Robert Ashley, respectively), the author meditates over the intricacies of artistic geniality as connected not only with fame but also with the necessity of painful survival under the pressures of the art market.
Somersault
Self
Using one half of a convex mirror mounted within a glass cylinder, Steina trains the video camera eye dead center as she records the space immediately around her. “Steina playfully does gymnastics with her camera and its mirrored lens attachment as a means of producing a 360-degree image of a torso wrapped around the camera lens . . . an exercise in an immersive space” for both maker and viewer. —Yvonne Spielmann
Somersault
Director
Using one half of a convex mirror mounted within a glass cylinder, Steina trains the video camera eye dead center as she records the space immediately around her. “Steina playfully does gymnastics with her camera and its mirrored lens attachment as a means of producing a 360-degree image of a torso wrapped around the camera lens . . . an exercise in an immersive space” for both maker and viewer. —Yvonne Spielmann
Progeny
Director
Progeny is a collaboration with sculptor Bradford Smith. Smith's organic and sensual sculptural forms are transformed by the merging of one of Steina's Machine Vision devices — a rotating, mirrored sphere with pre-programmed camera movements and optical transpositions — with Woody's digital processing.
In Search of the Castle
Director
This symbolic journey evokes the personal creative wandering of the Vasulkas. The landscape, shot from a car window while driving in the Santa Fe area, is gradually transformed with more and more complicated imagery techniques.
Group Portrait: Six Artists in Video
Self
This is a documentary about video artists Bill & Louise Etra, Woody & Steina Vasulka, and Kit Fitzgerald & John Sanborn.
Vasulka Video
In 1977 the Vasulkas were commissioned by public television to create six half-hour programs (Steina, Objects, Digital Images, Transformations, Vocabulary, Matrix) for broadcast on WNED in Buffalo, New York. The resulting series, entitled Vasulka Video, is innovative and informative television. The Vasulkas introduce and contextualize their works and discuss their processing techniques, providing invaluable insights into their groundbreaking experiments with electronic image and sound manipulation.
Vasulka Video
Director
In 1977 the Vasulkas were commissioned by public television to create six half-hour programs (Steina, Objects, Digital Images, Transformations, Vocabulary, Matrix) for broadcast on WNED in Buffalo, New York. The resulting series, entitled Vasulka Video, is innovative and informative television. The Vasulkas introduce and contextualize their works and discuss their processing techniques, providing invaluable insights into their groundbreaking experiments with electronic image and sound manipulation.
Violin Power
Self
Steina trained as a classical violinist, pushing her experience as a professional musician into the electronic realm with this seminal work. Originally performed in the late 1970s as a live recital with monitors, "Violin Power" began with the idea of generating a video image solely through the sound and movement of the bow. This signal switch, from audio to visual, grew in possibilities and variances as technology continued to expand in the ensuing decades. The most recent iteration of this performance involved Steina working with a MIDI violin and laptop.
Violin Power
Director
Steina trained as a classical violinist, pushing her experience as a professional musician into the electronic realm with this seminal work. Originally performed in the late 1970s as a live recital with monitors, "Violin Power" began with the idea of generating a video image solely through the sound and movement of the bow. This signal switch, from audio to visual, grew in possibilities and variances as technology continued to expand in the ensuing decades. The most recent iteration of this performance involved Steina working with a MIDI violin and laptop.
Orbital Obsessions
Director
Documentation and experimentation in real time, "Orbital Obsessions" is an example of early video self-portraiture, eerie and calm in its radical implications for the medium. The Vasulkas were interested in the building of control systems for the manipulation of electronic signals, resulting in their collaborations with several designers and engineers. One such example was the Multi-Level Keyer, a tool designed in 1973 by George Brown at the request of the Vasulkas, who were interested in expanding their range of source imagery. Steina’s manipulation of the image through keying, layering, and the manual control of luminance is seen here.
Orbital Obsessions
Self
Documentation and experimentation in real time, "Orbital Obsessions" is an example of early video self-portraiture, eerie and calm in its radical implications for the medium. The Vasulkas were interested in the building of control systems for the manipulation of electronic signals, resulting in their collaborations with several designers and engineers. One such example was the Multi-Level Keyer, a tool designed in 1973 by George Brown at the request of the Vasulkas, who were interested in expanding their range of source imagery. Steina’s manipulation of the image through keying, layering, and the manual control of luminance is seen here.
Flux
Director
In Flux, Steina films a river from a wide angle, deforming the image to the point of creating a sort of radiating, aqueous ball - like a liquid planet turning in space. Steina alternately shows fairly rapid shots, always taken at a very wide angle, which film the river once in one direction and then once in the other; she thus obtains a simple visual and very efficient equivalent of the energy of the water. The close succession of the shots, like the use of the reprocessed soundtrack of running water, are all variations on the texture of the aquatic substance. Under the façade of a work far removed from realism, Steina in fact offers a work that is in total contrast with the traditional images of running water, but, with her video vision, comes very close to literary and pictorial visions of romanticism. She manages to translate the entire mythology of water into images without using narrative or symbolism, but by simply using the possibilities provided by her camera and machines.
Switch! Monitor! Drift!
B&W Vasulka project with a rotating camera, keyed and alternating directions. This experiment is excerpted in their 1977 work Orbital Obsessions.
Switch! Monitor! Drift!
Director
B&W Vasulka project with a rotating camera, keyed and alternating directions. This experiment is excerpted in their 1977 work Orbital Obsessions.
Video: The New Wave
The New Wave is the seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synthesis, and performance video. This historical anthology includes excerpts of tapes by the following video pioneers: Stephen Beck and Warner Jepson, Peter Campus, Douglas Davis, Ed Emshwiller, Bill Etra, Frank Gillette, Don Hallock, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Paul Kos, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, Willard Rosenquist, Dan Sandin, James Seawright, Steina Vasulka, TVTV, Stan Vanderbeek and William Wegman.
Homemade TV: Vasulkas II
Description from Portable Channel catalog: "This Program is a unique broadcast presentation of the Vasulka's recent experiments with the electronic image. It is not "video on TV" but a "videobroadcast" direct from the Vasulkas' loft in Buffalo, New York." The broadcast does in fact feature 3 Vasulka projects in their entirety: The Matter, Soundgated Images, and C-Trend.
Homemade TV: Vasulkas II
Director
Description from Portable Channel catalog: "This Program is a unique broadcast presentation of the Vasulka's recent experiments with the electronic image. It is not "video on TV" but a "videobroadcast" direct from the Vasulkas' loft in Buffalo, New York." The broadcast does in fact feature 3 Vasulka projects in their entirety: The Matter, Soundgated Images, and C-Trend.
Homemade TV: The Electronic Image
A broadcast presentation of Steina and Woody Vasulka's experiments with the electronic image. Featuring a 15-minute "jam session" of improvised video feedback art.
Homemade TV: The Electronic Image
Director
A broadcast presentation of Steina and Woody Vasulka's experiments with the electronic image. Featuring a 15-minute "jam session" of improvised video feedback art.
Floor to Walls to Ceiling
Director
electro / opto / mechanical / environment
Solo for 3
Director
In this early formal experiment with analog image processing, the Vasulkas investigate multiple camera set-ups and keyers to articulate spatial, temporal and sound/image manipulation. Solo for 3 is a playful technical exercise in which three cameras were trained on three different images of the number three. Image planes are layered, arranged and sequenced; the result is a multifaceted choreography of numbers.
Soundsize
Director
Soundsize continues the Vasulkas' investigation into the relationship of sound and image. Here a pattern of dots is modulated by sounds generated from a synthesizer, changing size and shape in a visual manifestation of electronic sound.
Telc
Director
C-Trend
Director
Soundgated Images
Director
The Multikeyer and Scan Processor are used for creating the pulsating abstract composition showing six different cases of audio-video interface with the simultaneous generation of sound and image.
Noisefields
Director
This is an attempt to process abstract images without the use of camera. The central circle divides the creen into two parts that continually vibrate hypnotically and change colors to the accompanying rumbling of modulated sound.
1-2-3-4
Director
This work shows paradoxical space relations in electonic depths, where the common space coordinates no longer apply and where the images become objects in space. The numerals on the cakes were captured by four cameras and then processed with the Multikeyer.
Vocabulary
Director
Golden Voyage
Director
The work is inspired by the surrealist René Magritte's unsettling painting La Legende doree, depicting French baguettes flitting in a window frame. Woody and Steina used a three-camera construction and through the use of horizontal deflection created objects migrating through a landscape. Maureen Turim called this work "a meta-discourse on painting and video".
Distant Activities
Director
Real time development of a video feedback, processed and controlled through a video keyer. Sound results from video signals, interfaced with audio synthesizer.
Participation
Director
This period compilation of documentaries shot with a Portapak camera from the early era of video experimentation offers an immediate view of the independent New York art scene (concerts and theater perfomances on the streets and in the clubs of downtown). It is a sort of summary of Steina and Woody Vasulka's first creative period, a period of fascination with the more bizarre aspects of "new American decadence". Thanks to the video camera and its revolutionary implications, the creators were able to penetrate into spheres where the documentarians of more classical media were neither allowed nor interested to enter, thereby helping to expand the ideas of documentary possibilities. Steina has remarked that she learned the craft of camerawork as documentarian thanks to these celebratory, countercultural scenes of the "sexual avant-garde"-- Participation also features a pulsing light show projection at the Fillmore East, and a scene from Off-Broadway drag theater.
Calligrams
Director
A film by Steina and Woody Vasulka
Sexmachine
Director
Thierry
Director
One of the works assembled in the series Sketches. These early sketches, created not without the irony, examine ways of manipulating the video image. They indicate that the documentary trend in the Vasulkas' work was from the beginning mingled with free experimentation. These short tapes were modified from the early documentary tapes.
Discs
Director
In Discs, originally made as installation for a set of monitors, the creators experiment with the phenomenon of horizontal drift trhough the indtroduction of purposeful time error. The result is the repetitive abstract pattern of a distorted magnetic field. Furthermore, this horizontal stream also travels thorugh a set of TV screens stacked on top of each other, giving the work a vertical dimension as well. The image thus demonstrates the flexibility of the frame in video.
Tissues
Director
In Studies cycle, abstract studies are assembled, which document the Vasulka's early work with electronic material. The visual aspect of Tissues is the work of Steina, whereas Woody engineered the sound.
Interface
Director
An Interface not only between two continually switched over images but also between documentary tape, imagery taken from "reality", and its transformation in the electronic sphere.
Artificial Light x20
Director
A "remix" of Hollis Frampton's film Artificial Light by Steina Vasulka.
Old Lady El Toppo
Director
A 3-minute study of a wrinkle-faced old woman by one or both of the Vasulkas, produced late-career.
Orka
Director
STEINA: “My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition.