Woody Vasulka

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.

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.

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.

Manipulating a variety of sources, Vasulka uses creative imaging tools to situate historical images against Southwestern landscapes of incredible beauty. Contorting the images into a variety of isomorphic forms, Vasulka creates a literal shape for these memories, developing these shapes as metaphors for the processes of fragmentation, condensation, and inversion, that inevitably contort fact into memory. While much of the raw material for the tape is drawn from World War II and its rehearsals, the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, The Art of Memory is really an extended meditation seeking to reconcile the blurry, banal photographs of historic figures with the mass destruction they helped engineer.

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.

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.

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.

This is a documentary about video artists Bill & Louise Etra, Woody & Steina Vasulka, and Kit Fitzgerald & John Sanborn.

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.

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.

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.

B&W Vasulka project with a rotating camera, keyed and alternating directions. This experiment is excerpted in their 1977 work Orbital Obsessions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The image and sound are being simultaneously generated from a single source, which at the same time shapes the visual pattern as well as electronic sound of the resulting signal. The potential of the Scan Processor enables the modification of the shape and scale of geometrical patterns, resulting in the creation of a new kind of "image behavior".

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.

This tape was created when Woody visited his native Moravia with a Portapak camera. In the course of signal modulation an alteration in the field of raster lines is taking place, in which the lines are being vertically deformed and gain the contours of objects (with the use of a Rutt/Etra synthesizer).

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".

The SCAN PROCESSOR STUDIES are a collection of works by Woody Vasulka & Brian O'Reilly. The full work is of total approximate duration of 45 minutes, with sections of various lengths, textures, and dynamic qualities.

Set to Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War, Bill Etra's original performance on 9 B&W monitors was shot in real-time on 16mm color film by Woody Vasulka. The 16mm film added some unexpected and welcome color effects that lend themselves to the composition and the choice was made to leave them in.

Real time development of a video feedback, processed and controlled through a video keyer. Sound results from video signals, interfaced with audio synthesizer.

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.

A film by Steina and Woody Vasulka

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 3-minute study of a wrinkle-faced old woman by one or both of the Vasulkas, produced late-career.