Golden Voyage

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.

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

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.

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.

This series of short films offers a representative cross-section of the work produced at this famous Prague film school over the course of its 80-year history.

Matrix II explores the properties of images and sounds in the medium of video. Geometric shapes travel across a ‘matrix’ (grid) of cathode ray tube (CRT) screens. CRT televisions, which use manipulated electron beams to display images on a fluorescent screen, remained in widespread use until the early 2000s. The Vasulkas sought to test the limits of each monitor, creating a fluid motion resembling the behaviour of electronic signals. Matrix II is an early example of video art, which first developed in the late 1960s and 1970s as artists came into contact with new consumer technologies for capturing moving images.

With Voice Windows (1986), Steina renews her efforts to generate a complex sound-image interface

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.