The World of Equipments: Steina and Woody Vasulka
It is not easy to encompass the career of Steina and Woody Vasulka and boil it down to few lines, as extensive and varied as their field has been for more than fifty years from when they started their collaboration in the domaine of the video. It was precisely in the mid-sixties when the Japanese firm Sony launched its Portapak unit, the first camera recorder to be carried and controlled by one person although the the video recorder had to be carried separately in a bag on the shoulder. This unit, now considered uncomfortable and primitive, immediately created a flux of experiments with a medium, which started living its own life independent from the cinematic camera and the film. Although the video did not offer colour in the beginning it possessed various advantages over the motion picture, which attracted the film-maker and the hydraulic engineer Bohuslav Woody Vasulka, or Tímóteus Pétursson as he chose to call himself when accorded Icelandic citizenship in the late sixties.
A lot has been said about Woody’s and Steina’s first encounter in Prague 1962, where Steinunn Bjarnadóttir had come three years earlier to complete her violin studies. They married in 1964 and moved to New York the following year where Woody soon became a freelance multi-screen editor and industrial display designer. In 1967 he became a part of the team responible for the technical arrangement of the interior of the Biosphere created by the system theorist and inventor Buckminster Fuller for the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. At the same time he began experimenting with electronic sound, stroboscopic projections derived from moving images and light-activated screens. Experiments with video soon followed.
Meanwhile Steina kept faith with the violin despite continuous auditions at symphonic orchestras in New York and proximity, which tended to sour the enthusiasm. Finally both got enough of the drudging and decided to plunge on their own into research of the new medium. The year was 1969 and together they had been producing documentaries for Alternate Media Center at New York University School of the Arts. By the end of the decade they had acquired their own Sony Portapak unit and a VCS3 Putney audio synthesizer, of similar kind as the first mass-produced Putneys used by rock musicians as John Entwistle, David Gilmour and Brian Eno in the sixties.
In 1971 Woody and Steina created the experimental group Perception together with their colleague Eric Segal, obtaining a grant from NYSCA, the New York State art council, which allowed them further research into the evolution of multimedia. In the summer the same year they opened The Kitchen, the experimental electronic space, together with the carpenter and stage-hand Andy Mannik, in the former kitchen of the historic but derelict Broadway Central Hotel, once the biggest and the most luxurious hotel in America. Among other events Woody and Steina organized there the first video festival, in addition to a special video presentation at the Whitney Museum. A good year after the opening of The Kitchen Steina, together with film director Susan Milano, organized the first women video festival, finding as did Woody that women video artists were badly represented within the new media. The yearly festival was to continue into the eighties. Woody and Steina expected The Kitchen to last perhaps three to six months, yet it is still in full activity as the world’s most famous venue of its kind.
The documentary Participation, 1969-1971, is an indication of the first experiments of Woody and Steina in terms of the new technique, at the same time as this hourlong work, composed of bits of 76 hours recordings, sheds a captivating and an informative light on life in New York, especially the latent night life, among whom appearing are Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, as well as a number of actors from Andy Warhol’s experimental movies, the same who Lou Reed immortalized in his songs about the hazardous angles of the urban jungle.
Tired of the busy city Woody and Steina took the opportunity to accept the invitation of SUNY, State University of New York in Buffalo in spring 1973, where Woody was offered professorship at the newly established department of multimedia. Until they moved again to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1979, their interesses began to diverge. Woody focused his research on tools and technology, which e.g. affect the frequency of the transmission and distorts the regular and horizontal scan lines until they assume tridimensional yet transparent image like an embossed map. It was Woody’s aim to gain control over the conduct of a transmitted image in order to mould it and modify in real time. As a performing musician Steina’s interest was directed to the video camera and the possibilities of the lens as a prolongation of visual perception.
The seventies saw one masterpiece after another appear from Woody’s and Steina’s studio although their contribution to the art of video was not fully revealed until after 1990. Then Woody’s intricate work The Brotherhood, 1990-1998, a six-part installation of electronic engineering with endless unexpected aspects was presented in all its resplendence as a sum-up of decades of research into the nature of electronic and digital media technology. During the same period Steina completed Violin Power her masterpieces from the seventies and derived works as Orbital Obsession, 1977, and Machine Vision, 1975-, where the conclusion has not yet been reached. She surprised her audience by remotely controlling her concert in Santa Barbara, California, in a distance of thirteen hundred kilometres from Santa Fe where she was based. Some of her friends were convinced of having seen her at the concert by the Pacific Ocean when in fact she was only there virtually but not in reality.
It was perhaps a culmination of a long career of Woody and Steina when they were asked to curate the exhibition Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt –– Private World of the World of Equipments – at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, in 1992. This extensive and well planned exhibition opened the eyes of people in the international artworld to Woody’s and Steina’s successful career and dense social network. Since then their international reputation has grown, but despite rising prestige they continue developping and consolidating their electronic and digital art, mindful of the importance of media for the evolution of international art.
Halldór Björn Runólfsson
