Chapter 13

Video Phenomenology: The Vasulkas

Inside Electronic Media

Among video artists the position of the Vasulkas is quite singular. The work of ‘pioneer’ video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka can be characterized by a continuing inquiry in the electronic processing aspects of the medium ‘video,’ from an innate desire to understand at first the inner workings of electronic phenomena, and later of digital ones. In so doing, the artists have not only made a major contribution to art, but also to the development of image processing. They are the only artists who have persistently sought to integrate the matrices of the ‘system,’ like the video signal itself, in the creation of images and how these could have a meaning in themselves. Since the introduction of the digital editing system and the digital computer, their inquiry has expanded naturally into the syntactic elements of these media.

Woody Vasulka was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1937, as Bohuslav Vasulka. He studied hydraulic engineering, in which he obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1956, but decided to change careers and enrolled in the Film Department of the Art Academy in Prague, where he graduated in 1964. Steinuun (Steina) Briem Bjarnadottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1940. She studied the violin and music theory. In 1959, she obtained a grant to continue her studies at the Music Conservatory in Prague. The two met in 1962, married in 1964 , and moved to the United States in 1965. Since then they have worked together collaboratively and independently. Contrary to the Harrisons, the Vasulkas work more independently, especially lately, acknowledging both the shared contributions as well as the differences in their approach.

When Woody and Steina arrived in New York City, intermedia art was at its height. Diving into an active New York art scene, they found themselves attracted by the experimental side, to artists working in the margins. During the first two years, Woody Vasulka returned to film - the medium he had worked in back in Czechoslovakia. In the summer of 1967, while working on multi-screen films, he met Alphons Schilling, with whom he began to experiment with electronic sound and stroboscopic light. In 1969, they met Harvey Lloyd, who had built a small cheap little studio where he had begun to make videotapes, which Steina frequently watched. These early videotapes still used video feed-back as imaging code, but, as a trained musician, Steina became especially interested in the sound - image relationships. Woody, however, was immediately struck by “the image representing an energy system,” to use his own words.[394] It was the beginning of “their dialogue with the machine.” “I have to share the creative process with the machine. It is responsible for too many elements in this work,” said Woody.[395] Note that this is a different attitude from the one that sets out to be the master of technology, to ‘master’ nature. Thus from the start the Vasulkas were not so much fascinated by its images, as by the capabilities of electronic technology itself.

Setting up their own studio in 1970, they bought a portapak, as well as a sound synthesizer and three monitors. Woody Vasulka had left his job and, in order to support themselves, they now had to apply for fellowships and grants. As New York State Council on the Arts funding was only available through non-profit organizations, they founded the group “Perception,” together with Juan Downey, Frank Gillette, Beryl Korot, Andy Mann, Ira Schneider, and Eric Siegel.[396] In 1972, they already received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and were invited to participate in the programs of KQED-TV’s National Center for Experiments in Television (San Francisco) and WNET/Thirteen Television Laboratory (New York). In the meantime they had co-founded The Electronic Kitchen, later on The Kitchen, as a center for electronic music, video and performances. The space was set up as an informal laboratory for artists to meet and experiment with sound and inmages, and would become the center for these activities during the seventies and part of the eighties.[397]

Woody Vasulka summarized the early excitement about the “new medium” and all the activities that evolved from it as follows: “What is special about video art at this time (1972) is that it isn’t yet trapped in rigid rules. There are not yet any clichés, and the artists haven’t had time to develop the maniacal egos one finds in the other arts. All the video artists are like one big family and thinking about video’s big future.”[398] The Vasulkas were interested in art and counterculture, but less in politics. However, counter-culture and politics were closely allied then, so they hovered for a while between the ‘established artists,’ exhibiting in the art circuit, and the politically active ‘community art’ groups. Steina Vasulka described their position succinctly when she said: “None of them (by which she meant groups like Raindance or Global Village) were particularly interested in art, although a lot of them had art backgrounds. ... This was their anti-art statement, so that set us immediately on the fringe, because we were never really interested in politics. I saw it as an American internal affair that was very interesting for me to watch as a foreigner, nothing else.”[399] For the Vasulkas initially these roads crossed. While experimenting for ‘artistic’ reasons, they also made documentaries for the Alternative Media Center in New York and, like Nam June Paik, compiled an archive documenting this cultural world of New York City.

Digital Space as Perceptual Environment

Woody's initial fascination centered on the differences between film and video; video has no single frame, for example, film does. Also the electronic spectrum is not confined to a frame but exists in a principally undefined space. The video space is a floating space. Stein described her first encounter as falling in love; "As soon as I had a video camera in my hand - as soon as I had that majestic flow in under control, I knew I had my medium."[401] Their research has from the start included both the nature of the video signal and the audio signal, being based on the same electronic principles. Sound can be used to generate video images, and vice versa, as the early experiments with audiosynthesizers proved. Many of their early videotapes and environments are experiments in this relationship.[402]

The investigation into the matrix of video led to a series of works where images and sounds came purely from the machine. A next step consisted into exploring the nature of the spatial aspects of the video image, and in particular the horizontal drift, where images literally drift horizontally from one monitor to the next. A three-segment videotape from 1970, Evolution, 'organizes' the various stages of human evolution using this feature. At the time they could not yet technically control the speed of the drift. This problem was solved in 1972, when they had a Horizontal Drift Variable Clock built for them by tool builder/engineer George Brown. In Spaces I and Spaces II (1972), the horizontal drift is brought together with video-activated sound imagery. Spaces II textures three layers of shapes, which image planes move simultaneously and horizontally over the screen. The next step was to create images in which foreground and background relationships were manipulated, exploring spatial effects and the three-dimensional possibilities of a normally non-dimensional imagery. So Brown constructed a so called multi-keyer for them, which made it possible to layer up to six images on top of each other and key them to manipulate the images at will. (The normal standard at the time was two) The Vasulkas circumscribed the numerous videotapes that resulted from the increasingly complex combinations as Electronic Image and Sound Compositions. The images of these videotapes are composed of various in essence abstract wave modulations which hovered often between the abstract and organic, although they resembled landscapes or created other associations with nature. "They resemble something you remember from dreams or pieces of organic nature, but they never were real objects, they have all been made artificially from various frequences from sounds, from audible pitches and their beats."[403]

Woody Vasulka once explained why and how they decided to take this direction of not accepting the available hardware and the existing capabilities offered with it. Being educated in film, he had come to understand the economic structure of its production system - the studios, laboratories, equipment and so forth - as a system in which the filmmaker was subordinate to the existing structure. When he started working with electronic equipment it was for the first time that he managed to achieve some independence, or, as he called it "to personalize the process of image-making." This personalization of the tools has become a consistent striving of the artists. In a sense tool has come to equal medium. Of course, economics played a crucial role as well. One has to remember that before the portable video equipment, and the personal computer became consumer goods, these technologies were mainly utilized by reasearch facilities and laboratories. However, Woody Vasulka came across one feature of the American industries that fascinated him tremendously, as he recalls: "In working with electronic systems, I've been able to observe how they became available, how they filtered down from this industrial or commercial world to the point where they were within my reach. I also discovered that in the United States there's an alternative industrial subculture which is based on individuals, in much the same way that art is based on individuals. (..) These people, the electronic tool designers, have maintained their independence within the system. And they have become artists, and have used the electronic tools which they had created. We've always maintained this very close symbiotic relationship with creative people outside industry, but who have the same purposeless urge to develop images or tools, which we all then call, maybe, art."[404] So it happened that Vasulkas began to collaborate with a community of engineers and artist-engineers like Eric Siegel, George Brown, Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, Don MacArthur, and still do.in order to develop the tools they needed for their work.

When the Vasulkas purchased the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor in 1974, a video-synthesizer, Woody felt that this piece of equipment gave him a wholly different understanding of the electronic image, since it enabled him to perceive of the image as a product of time and energy. Rutt/Etra processes a signal such that the electron beam, that is light energy, scans an image in such a way that it becomes a series of waving lines. The face, for example, dissolves into a kind of topographical map where the lines indicate the high and low areas, visualized as brightness, or relative darkness The bright areas are raised and the dark areas lowered; a three-dimensional image appears. Because the time segments step-by-step evolved from two dimensional to three dimensional patterns using as programmable building element the waveform. Or, as Scott Nygren explained: "The Rutt/Etra reorganizes imagery by electromagnetic deflection of the electron beam; deflection coils form a yoke surrounding a monitor built into the synthesizer. The resulting images can only be recorded by means of an external camera, since the waveform display, or raster image, alone is altered, not the waveform code directly."[405] For Woody this feature became a central element in creating a syntax for electronic images, at least for a while. For Steina it functioned as a deconstructive device. The Rutt/Etra Scan Processor not only allowed the video raster to be reshaped through magnetic deflection, the scan processor could also visually display the most basic elements of the video signal itself in a precise manner. It also helped in clarifying how the conversion of light into energy happens sequentially when the electronic image is created; the time frame obtained particular significance to him. It confirmed Woody's notion that video was in fact nothing more than electromagnetic energy constructed in time. (Compared with the photographic/filmic (camera obscura) process whereby during exposure time all parts of the (film/photo) emulsion are converted into another code simultaneously.) Videotapes made between 1974 and 1977, such as Reminiscence (1974), Telc (1974), The Matter (1975), and C-Trend (1975) try to depict this process.

Woody: A "Code" for Electronic Images

Steina: "Machine Vision"

Since their move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1980, Steina has continued this approach and had consistently developed and adapted it in installations like The West (1983-1984), Geomania (1989) or Borealis (1993). The exploration of the phenomenology of space now includes the outdoors. She admits: “I moved there because I wanted to experience what it is to live in beauty. I did not want to think that it was going to affect my images as much as it did. For the first two years I resisted it. First of all because the beauty of the West is so seductive. And, secondly, I didn’t feel up to it. ... I just went outside one morning and said ‘Well, my studio doesn’t have any walls and the ceiling is very high, and it’s blue.’ I just adopted the whole Southwest as my studio. So that’s when I made peace with the idea that the landscape of the Southwest was going to be my image material.”[412] Since the ordinary beauty of a landscape still remained suspect to her, she re-configured it into an imagery which appears to represent a metaphor for human intervention in nature at large. The West is a two-channel video installation about this landscape of the Southwest. It is a story of nature become landscape, of the cultivation of a piece of land once wild where “mankind leaving an imprint” is visible everywhere, through buildings, telephone cables, satellite and telescope systems (Los Alamos is near). Using the spherical mirror to create double vision and the horizontal drift to dissolve the visual frame of a motif, mixing natural and electronic colors, overlapping different images, she visualized the land as being in continuous motion, like a musical composition. The four-channel audio piece is fully integrated with the video images. In Lilith, a videotape made in 1987, she superimposed the face of a woman - painter and poet Doris Cross - on a landscape. Willingly or not, Steina thereby created a layering of metaphors for similar processes in all living beings on earth: a passage of time portrayed in the face of an elderly woman coincides with the changing faces of the land: mother earth. The footage for Borealis (1993) was filmed during a stay in Iceland, where she was born. On four large translucent screens suspended in ‘space’ close-up images of foaming and surging waters overwhelm the passing observer. The continuous coalescing movement and sound are more than a suggestion of the power and force of nature. There is an awe toward nature and the aesthetics of the natural environment, combined with a healthy scepsis towards false sentiment and sentimentality.

If one wants to distinguish between the work of the two artists, one can interpret Steina’s recent work as a method to connect the machine vision with the reality of the external world, i.e. external from the point of view of the eye of the camera, whereas Woody’s critical investigations of the function of the machine and its applications can be seen as a description of the internal workings of the machine, an exploration of the space within. They are investigating the same landscape as it were, but from different complementary perspectives, Woody from the inside and Steina from the outside.

Woody: Mapping Memories

Contextualizing Virtual Space

Vasulka’s research project is cross-disciplinary, involves work stations and what Gene Youngblood has called a “design team” (including composer/artist David Dunn, media writer/critic Gene Youngblood, poet Liz Rymland, and artist/writer Peter Weibel), to investigate both the technical and intellectual/philosophical questions. That this type of research is not just technical is self-evident, as it touches on concepts of computer interactivity, artificial intelligence and computer learning systems, connectionism (the science concerned with the functioning of neural networks in the brain and parallel computer processing) and such technological developments as virtual reality. Constituting a major expansion of the traditional concepts of system control, the significance of these aspects of digital space extends “beyond the domain of art to proffer an expansion of human imagina-tion through the merger of artistic perception and scientific process.”[417]

His new project, called The Brotherhood (1995), consists of series of Tables built from scraps of industrial and military waste from nearby junkyards in Los Alamos and elsewhere, and investigates possibilities of a more fully interactive environment. Woody Vasulka about Table III: “In principle, the installation performs its preprogrammed audio/videocycle; the overall composition progresses as a single time line unless the audience intervenes. The visual concept is based on a single light beam, split and redirected to the six coordinates of a cube. At the walls of the imaginary cube, there are six translucent screens, showing the projected images on both sides of the screens.”[418] It runs on an interactive laserdisc program. References and comments concerning the nuclear and space industries come to mind; thoughts about mankind’s - mainly male, though - tendency to want to reorganize everything in nature; about man-machine relationships in general.

However, for the Vasulkas the concept of computer interactivity is understood to be more than the interface between the machine and the user/perceiver, hopefully opening up new potentials to describe the “real landscape,” as a “landscape of synthesized images, which could create new sensory relationships - new perceptual experiences.”[419]

The Artist as Mediator

The relationship to science is their apperception of art as a problem solving activity, as a mode of inquiry, which may lead beyond the existing utilization of the hardware and software presented by the industries and to an evolution of the implied system aesthetics. Woody Vasulka has said about his position: “I come from a non-scientific discipline. But in going through the system I keep finding these coincidences, and then I try to rationalize them as I see them. I wouldn’t be able to rationalize them beforehand as scientists do. They usually have a much clearer idea of what they’re seeking. I’ve always been interested in ambiguity, or rather in magic, in imaging.”[421] He has explained that he sees himself as a mediator of this kind of knowledge, making computer science available as a commonly utilized material with the general purpose to create works of art that contribute to the evolution of these technologies which they translate into ‘personalized tools,’ hoping that “the articulation of such syntactical principles will have direct application in such fields as scientific visualization and artificial reality research.”[422] Interpreted this way, there is indeed an educational, didactic aspect implied in the research. Apart from that, there are several other levels of research to distinguish. First there is the research itself, as an explanatory mode of the internal functions of the new technologies. Secondly, by opening up the possibility of a personalization of these ‘tools’ or media, their working method literally transforms the notion of our accepting what the industries offer, with all the economic and political implications. Thirdly, they feel that artists “must help to shape what is quickly unfolding as a fundamentally new perceptual environment which is ushering forth profound epistemological changes...for the sake of cultural evolution and preservation.”[423] So their longstanding interest in cognition and perception needs to be considered as well. How we receive images and retain them is just as important for the Vasulkas as it is to Bill Viola. Finally, the communication and information context of these media systems and how they affect human behavior in an automated environment are also part of the research.[424]

The Vasulkas and their collaborators are convinced that the digital computer will bring totally new characteristics into sensory, linguistic and social communication, which will in turn have a direct impact on our mode of thinking. Woody Vasulka thinks that it will effect the way we look at reality, which he feels will express itself as a confrontation between the computer-generated imagery, which is an internally created reality, and external reality. But the discussion concerning the illusionary aspects of the artificial, synthetic image and the ‘real’ image will become less and less important.

Summarizing, we can say that the Vasulkas’ research of digital space leaves the boundaries of the art object in two directions: 1. externally, into an art that searches to bring together interdisciplinary functions, 2. internally, into an art that searches to merge accepted aesthetic conventions by creating a new perceptual mode of viewing the environment. We have already mentioned that Gene Youngblood coined the term “metadesign” to designate the work of artists who set out to create a new context rather than focus on content only. This “metadesigner” searches for new models, as it were, which may be technical, structural, perceptual, aesthetic and so forth, to be used by others, whether artists or other people, to create contexts. Accepting this definition, the Vasulkas would indeed fall into this ‘category.’[425]