A Dialogue with the Demons of the Tools: Steina and Woody Vasulka 9788090776364

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Steina and Woody Va~ulka, The Vasullcas Studio at 111 East 14th Street, New York City, 1969

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A Dialogue with the Demons of the Tools: Steina and WOody Vasulka Texts © Lenka Dolanova, Tomas Ruller Photos © Vasulka Kitchen Brno archives © Vasulka Kitchen Brno, 2021 ISBN 978-B0-90n63-6-4

Contents 7 11

Foreword Outside the frame

19 21

37

Introduction Breaking out of the frame: The video generation "Our bodies are hardware, our behavior software" A dialogue with the tool

45 47 51 56

Early experiments Brno and Reykjavik, Prague Vision machines The new world of video

67 69

Cooking in The Kitchen What did they cook there? The cooks, their Kitchen, and the taste of fresh video Live video Reviews of The Kitchen and the end of its early era

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74 80

85 87 91 95

Image processing: Wave, the signal is coming Cyclical unconsciousness The expanded image Image processing

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Audiovisual synthesis Synthesizers: The beginning of the relationship between image and sound The evolution of tools "Tool person" George Brown

121 123 126 130

Buffalo 1973-1979 The Center for Media Study Rutt/Etra: Images from lines "Practical philosophy"

139 141 149

From analog to digital In a digital skin Observing observation

157 159 177

Santa Fe: Room for contemplation The art of memory From a dialogue with the tool to The Brotherhood Digital performances Woody's actors: Living machines

103 105

111

187 192

201 203

Archival fever Archival activities by and around The Vasulkas

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Filmography, Videography, Bibliography

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The Kitchen, New York, 1971

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Foreword The book you now hold in your hands has been published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding o f The Kitchen in New York and ten years after its original Czech version. It is the result of many years of research conducted by Lenka Dolanova at Prague's Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This school is where Woody Vasulka studied directing in the mid-1960s, and it is where he met Steina (Steinunn Briem Bjarnad6ttir), with whom he later left for her native Iceland and eventually the United States, where they wrote themselves into the history of video and new media art. The original research conducted at the Center for Audiovisual Studies, where Woody was active for some time in the 1990s, was supervised by Milos Vojtechovsky. (My positive assessment and recommendation was written for dissertation defense in 2009.) I had the opportunity to collaborate intensively with the Vasulkas after the Velvet Revolution. During Woody's temporary return to his native Brno in the mid-1990s we co-founded the multimedia center and media archive at Brno University of Technology's Faculty of Fine Arts. Thanks to Woody, Brno became a center of new media art within the former Eastern Europe (we showed works by Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, Stelarc, Orlan, and many other artists). We also showed several of Woody's most important works (Pioneers of Electronic Art, 1992; Theatre of Hybrid Automata, 1993; Friendly Fire, 1994) and organized exhibitions in the Czech Republic (The Czech Electronic Image and Video Art '94: Nature in Motion, Manes, Prague, 1994) and elsewhere in Europe (V2, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle, Bonn; ZKM, Karlsruhe; INM, Frankfurt; Monte Video and STEIM, Amsterdam; Ars Electronica, Linz). We also used to meet at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Steina opened the exhibition Hi-Tech/Art 1995 with her performance Violin Power, and in 1996 at the Brno House of Arts Jennifer De Felice and I curated her first European retrospective, a selection of which Milos Vojtechovsl1

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Robert l ewts "CLE"RUGHT" Dlrcy t.Mtermann C;ncty Vallol, Steina and Woody used oscillators that, when connected to a monitor, c reate interference patterns due to the conflict of different frequencies. Elements (1971) makes use of video feedback and video signals influenced by a sound synthesizer. The interlacing of video signals with a sound synthesizer was also used to create the audio track for Black Sunrise (1971) and for Steina's Distant Activities (1972). Home (1973), a work made using horizontal shift with rapid switching between shots of ordinary household items, was inspired by a summer 1971 residency at the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET) where Woody and Steina could make use of technology while perfecting their work with signal manipulation. Steina later recalled that "we learned about signal generators and waveform monitors, that if you had good end signal, all laws of generation and processing could be violated." 145 The audio component of some of the Vasulkas' later works is reflected right in their titles: Soundgated Images (1974), for instance, grew out of experiments with various forms of audio/video interference. In this work, abstract video images, variously altered using programmers, keyers, or scan processors, are transformed depending on the sound. According to the notes on this work published in an early catalogue, it was the result of experimenting with six different kinds of audiovisual interfaces, for instance "a gentle flute-like sound that produces abstract visual forms is interrupted by a harsh elec tronic buzz and compressed, flashing shapes; a raspy, clapping sound alters the colors and shapes of several abstract forms.'1146 In Soundsize (1974),

145 146

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"Steins·. Undated text. Va~ulka Kitchen Brno archives. ·vasulka Catalogue, program notes,• p. 5. Va~ulka Ki tchen Brno archives.

AUDIOVISUAL SYNTHESIS

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a dot pattern is displayed on a Rutt/ Etra scan processor and altered through random cycles of a sound synthesizer's control signals that simultaneously influence the sound pitch and the image pattern size. The Vasulkas' catalogue of works also includes Soundprints (1971 or 1972), a work I have not been able to find. According to the description, it was a loop showing the material unity of sound arnd image.147 Other artists besides the Vasulkas who engaged in real-time audiovisual performances included the Chicago School (Dan Sandin and Phil Morton in particular) and Stephen Beck in California, the latter of whom built his Direct Video Synthesizer CDVS) in 1970/1971 when he was just twenty-one years old. The tool was designed to work in real time so that its effects would be immediately visible. Like Eric Siegel, Beck saw his synthesizer not as a tool for making video tapes but as an instrument by which he could "play images as music." Dan Sandin was directly inspired by the ideas of Robert Moog,148 creator of the popular audio synthesizer, and even used the Moog no. 2 as inspiration when designing his image processor (the Sandin Image Processor, built in 1971-1 973), intended for real -time image processing.149 The Sandin Image Processor could be programmed using a patch panel (it was "patch programmable") and was intended as an alternative television studio accessible to ordinary individuals. It closely resembled musical instruments, especially by its focus on process and "practice," and its modular construction allowed for its expansion by adding new modules and combining a number of different functions. Designed to process video in real time, it enabled layering, keying, colorization, and image inversion. To a significant degree, the "live" aspect of early video resulted from the lack of programs tor saving images; the only way to mix tapes was to do so live, and the existing tools practically called for such improvisation. Chicago was also home to the Chicago Editing Circle, an artistic-politicalactivist collective that offered editing support. Editing was one of the biggest difficulties, since editing equipment was more expensive

147 148

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Cathcart, Vasulka: Steina, Machine Vision: Woody. Descriptions, p. 45 (see note 52). Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco describe the development of synthesizers In Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). The Moog is a modular synthesizer whose Individual modules are connected by cables to create "patches.· The generated signals can be combined into a single output. The first version of the Moog (1964) was more of a professional studio system, but later models could be used for real-time studio performances. In 1971, Moog M usic released the Minimoog Model D, one of the first relatively accessible portable synthesizers, which was specially designed as a standalone musical instrument. Among other things, the Moog standardized the range of signals, making It possible to connect various modular Inputs to create a multi-modal synesthesla. For the development of tools, see, e.g., the Interview with Dan Sandin at Criticalartware, available online at https://www.vimeo.com/62921513. Among other things, the Chicago-based video colle(;tive Criticalartware explores the ties between analog and digital media history, for instance the relationship between Sandin's analog image processor and Max/MSP software.

AUDIOVISUAL SYNTHESIS

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than recording equipment. The Vasulkas and Dan Sandin first met in the early 1970s in New York and remained in contact afterwards, exchanging information and video tapes. The real-time aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s is present in contemporary audiovisual works made using algorithmic programming environments suc h as MAX/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, and Processing. It can also be found in the field of live coding, in which the "artwork" is c reated in real time during the process of writing and rewriting software code. The Santa Fe- based artists David Stout and Cory Metcalf, for instance, are direct successors to the Vasulkas, c reating self-generated 3D images by applying mathematical feedback to simple geometric structures.150 In the field of digital work, a straight line connects audiovisual tools with lmage/ine, a software tool developed in 1996 by Steina Vasulka and the engineer Tom Demayer at Amsterdam's Studio for Electro- Instrumental Music CSTEIM) whic h will be discussed later. Evolution (1971) plays with rearranging the image timing by placing the horizontal and vertical sync hronization "into conflict." Woody considered thi s work central to his early experimentation. The first part, in which white splotches of light emerge from the background in sync h with the audio, was made using video feedback in which fluctuating image signals control a sound synthesizer. In the second part, which consists of a "film" of man's evolutionary path as we know it from biology textbooks, plus other footage, the frame is shifted horizontally and vertically, i.e., to the sides and up and dow n. The third part consists of rays of light (audio curves) generated by a sound synthesizer. The film was made using the Horizontal Drift Variable Clock, an oscillator circuit that acts as an external source of sync hronization and allows the artist to control the horizontal motion of the image, i.e., to "shift" the image out of the frame in a process called drift.151 The tool was built for the Vasulkas in 1972 by George Brown, another of their outstanding technical collaborators, about whom Woody said: "George's instruments put us right into the middle of media experimentation. To us they felt very sophisticated and, just as with digital tools and the computer, we never reached the bottom of the

150

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In the article "All Problems of Notation wlll be Solved by the Masses; Simon Yuill describes live coding as "the way It makes the continual re-writing of code Itself a primary mode of artistic production, and, secondly, its presentation of the 'work' itself as an open-ended mutable piece of code rather than as a static discrete artefact.• Online at https:l/www.metamute.org/editorial/ articles/all- problems-notatlon-wlll-be-solved-masses#comments_ none. According to Woody Va§ulka. It was less of a tool and more like an external source

of synchronization for controlling horizontal drift. It consists of two cameras: one that Is connected to the usual horizontal and vertical synchronization signal, and another that wor)180 opens with Steina, Woody, and Jeffrey Schier seated at a table. In a voiceover in her distinctive Icelandic accent, we hear Steina explaining the history and planned used of the Digital Image Articulator: "In the summer of

175 176 1n 178 179 180

Woody Vasulka, "Toward a Non- Centric Narrative Space; in ed. Marco Maria Gazzano, Steina e Woody Vasulka: Video, Media e Nuove lmmag/nl NetrArte Contemporanea (Rome: Edizioni Fahrenheit 451, 1995), p. 106. Gene Youngblood, ·vasulka Interview," In Vasulka and Weibel, Buffalo Heads (see note 6). A tran script of Nekes's lecture In which he expounded on the theory of kine was published with an introduction by David S. Lenfest as "Whatever happens between the pictures." Afterimage 5, no. 5 (November 19n): p. 7-13. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusln, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000). "Syntax of Binary Images· Is the title of an Interview between Woody and Charles Hagen. Hagen, "A Syntax of Binary Images• (see note 33). Cantaloup was a production of The Television Laboratory WNET /Thirteen.

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1978 we d ecided to build a digital image tool." There follows a shot of Wood y and Jeffrey in discussion at a worktable, and then of Jeffrey alone, making a drawing. ':Jeffrey took the c hallenge to design suc h a tool, whic h took eighteen months from its inception to where it is now, which is by no means finished. Some 20,000 connections were w ired by Woody." The voiceover continues over a shot of Woody soldering "And this is the device. It's computer-controlled and operated through a keyboard." The video goes on to explain the digitizing process: The image is sliced into sixteen numerical values from the brightest to black. The artists' proclaimed desire to "look behind the image" would lead to the discovery of how the image is expressed via digital c ode. Woody's head appears in a number of different colors, a hand types on a keyboard, and the image is transformed into black- and- white. Steina explains pixels and how to work with them. Footage of a street with a storefront appears first unmanipulated and then modified, "briefly held in memory.ff and thus pixelated. In another sequence, the image is multiplied, Woody's face is frozen, and the pixelated image is split into four time- shifted sections. Speaking offscreen, Steina says that their next area of exploration is programming. In the end, a shot of all three protagonists is subjected to multiplication: Woody engages in the "senseless movement" of waving his hand, Jeffrey blinks his eyes, and Steina asks Woody to focus in on her eyes. The initial motivation behind acquiring a computer was to program the timing of the signal in "interactive real time." In the digital realm, the image must be disassembled and put back together. The articulator was invented in order to discover the digital code of the image. It made it possible to work with the image differently, for instance by freezing the image at any moment or by working with just one part of the image, such as the part that is in motion. Seen from today's perspective, when special effects are a regular part of the digital imagination, Cantaloup is valuable for its documentary style showing the Vasulkas' approach to testing their equipment and demonstrating its possible visual output, with the video's c reators and collaborators themselves becoming its test subjects. Woody and Steina began working on the device originally called the Digital Image Processor (later developed into the Digital Image Articulator) in 1975 in collaboration with physicist Don McArthur, computer scientist Jeffrey Schier, and musician and programmer Walter Wright. 181 The Articulator's main function was to process encoded images in real time by translating analog Images into digital ones. It

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In 1975, Donald Mc Arthur designed tho basic orchllecturo ol the device·s drg1tal system and dovolopod tho monltOl's binary spocll1cotions . Wolter Wrtght laid out tho lirst f)fogrommlng dlogrom Jeffrey Schier rov1sod ond SIOblllzod tho hardware, developed the ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), and added o processor and sovorol other elements Other names tor tho device aro Emuls1ller, Vasulka Imaging System, and lmagor.

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processed video signals and combined analog and digital func tions. One fundamental requirement was dynamic real-time image depic tion, although this was initially possible only at low resolutions. The computers then available on the market were incapable of processing images in real time. The Vasulkas began working with tools combining analog and digital functions in the early 1970s. Around 1976, they acquired an LS-11 microcomputer and began to program video signals using binary code. The Articulator was designed to disassemble the footage into a coded structure in real time and to reproduce it as a real-time event. The Vasulkas tested the device in 1979- 1987, but it remained in the prototype stage. Its functions are desc ribed in a manual written by Woody with Jeffrey Schier and Tom Moxton in 1979. The Articulator processed encoded images and converted analog values into digital values (meaning it converted a video signal into the logical values of binary code). This numerical content of the "image" was then recorded and stored in a system of eight data buffers, with each brightness value assigned a numerical value on a grid measuring 128x128 pixels. The image could then be subjected to various alterations such as image inversion, the compression or expansion of the frame, outlining, changes in contrast, breaking the image down into pixels, or experimenting with the feedback of pre-programmed effects by feeding them back into the system.182 As with his analog work, Woody Vasulka took a didactic approach to digital video, mainly for his own purposes as he sought to understand how the digital world functioned. The result was "Syntax of Binary Images," a text published in Afterimage magazine in 1978 in which he assessed his first encounters with digitally organized imaging. Binary code operations form the guiding principle of image processing. The article included a table of images on which Woody explored the changes made possible by the interaction of two structures (A, B> used as inputs into the ALU (arithmetic logic units). The objective of the text was educational and far from trifling: to create a "universal, unambiguous score of the image." The ALU could perform operations on two sets of four-bit inputs simultaneously, mean ing concurrently on sets A and B containing, for instance, camera sequences or a vertical and a horizontal element. The entire set is shown in tables 1-13, each consisting of sixteen images representing sixteen different arithmetic operations (at resolutions of 1, 2, and 4 bits).183 Instead of trying to modify the image as with analog, artists sought to "compute" it. They approached this new work with the same enthusiasm for the unknown and worked with the same real-time and

l Woody Va~ulka's Syntax of Binary Images, pnnted in After1mage magazine, 1978

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1 182 183

Woody Vasulka, Jeffrey Schier, and Tom Moxton, The articulator manual, unpublished technical manual for the Digital Image Articulator, ca. 1979. Hagen, · syntax of Binary Images· (see note 33).

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feedback modes, meaning that the main theme of most of their works was still the attempt to capture their dialogue with the tool, the observation and "construction of digitally organized images," and the gradual creation of visual, cognitive, and perceptive units of the frame. The Vasulkas' work with the Articulator is perhaps best documented by Artifacts (1980), where the transition to digital video can be seen in the shot of a sphere that is subjected to pixelation. Its parts are "peeled off" one at a time, "layer by layer, number by number." After this, the screen shows a pixelated surface on which a circular cutout or outline of a circle occasionally appears, with Woody saying in voiceover: "By 'artifacts' I mean that I have to share the creative process with the machine. It is responsible for too many elements in this work. These images come to you as they've come to me - in a spirit of exploration." 184 He then invites the viewers to blink their eyes, move their heads, and to pause the video every now and then - i.e., to metaphorically participate in the process of creating the image. Another section shows a black-and-white image of Woody's hand, its outline spreading across the screen until it covers it fully, becoming a moving structure that emerges from the pixelated background. While in this first part the relationship of the circular field or the hand with the "background" brings to mind Noisefields, the subsequent color section with Woody's hand in front of a sphere is a reference to Vocabulary, which also showed a hand interacting with a sphere. In an article written at the time, Lucinda Furlong offered a perfect description of the process of digitizing the camera image for this video: "It consists of a series of camera-generated and computer-synthesized images which are combined and processed according to algorithmic functions. For example, a camera-generated image of a hand and a computer-generated texture are superimposed and transformed by means of a program based on the four Boolean logical operations. In another segment, a sphere is multiplied into a grid of spheres, which rapidly zooms forward and backward. [...] In yet another bit of technical wizardry, we see Vasulka's hand holding a sphere, over which is keyed the same image in miniature. The smaller

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Artifac ts, 1980, 22:50 min.

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image is composed of square blocks, a result of its having been fed through an analog-to-digital converter." 185 In another part of the video, the outline of a circle returns w ith the outline of a hand in front of it, and an abstract pixelated surface passes through them in the form of a left-to-right moving structure. The subsequent sequence works with multiplication, first of the hand (with various levels of delay) and then of Woody in the kitchen, variously zoomed in o r out, flipped on his side, or switched in synch with the sound. Then the image splits into nine w indows and we zoom in and out, the multiplication continues, and the entire image is stretched vertically and horizontally to the point of total abstraction. The next multiple image again shows a hand in front of a sphere, with ever faster zooming in and out causing the image to resemble a surface of white vibrating spheres. There follows a color shot of a sphere filled with a smaller black-and-white "reflection" of the larger image. The movements of Woody's hand passing across the sphere are repeated within the sphere. This folding of the image in on itself is a c lear reference to Vocabulary, in which the hand "pulled" rays of light from a sphere. Here, Woody essentially has the image uin his hand," his movements controlling the mirror movement inside the sphere. Artifacts demonstrates the possibilities of digital image manipulation and highlights its relationship to analog video (including specific older works by the Vasulkas). This connection is apparent in the use of the same starting images (a sphere against a background, a hand, Woody's face), which among other things also shows the greater precision of image control. The impact of the Vasulkas' electronic images rests in the simplicity and minimalist nature of the input image, placed within the context of something "unnormal." Even in the digital realm, much of the Vasulkas' work consists of documenting their relationship to the tool, and the process of testing the image-modifying device essentially becomes the main, if not only, content of the work. The relationship to the digital realm's specific narrative form is clear from the Vasulkas' statement from their introduction to a technical descrip tion of the Vasulka Imaging System: "In computer imaging our attention to composition has almost all been consumed by a concentration on a single field formation. The density of events associated with this action, vocabulary, and a presence of a strong imaging myth, has fully satisfied our need for narrativities. We have directed all our attention toward that territory." 186

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Lucinda Furlong, "State of the Art Scan: The Ithaca Video Festival; Afterimage 9, no. 6 (January 1982): p. 12-14. Schier, The Vasulka Imaging System (see note 172).

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According to Lucinda Furlong, Woody Vasulka understood Artifacts as a "skeletal collection of 'words"' that cannot be meaningfully structured without a sufficiently developed vocabulary. She also emphasized that the Vasulkas' work placed great demands on the viewer, since its integrity can only be properly appreciated with an understanding of their "infectious fascination for and commitment to the medium." 187 When watching the Vasulkas' videos, it is important to observe their inner struggle with the medium. Other videos characterized by the contact between analog and digital work are Selected Treecuts (1977), which consists of periodically frozen and pixelated images of trees that call attention to the way in which early digital tools were used, and Bad (1979), in which Steina similarly (but more comprehensively) worked with the image of a woman's face and the correspondence between sound and image (the audio signal determines how and when the images stored in memory appear on screen). In a work created in collaboration with Woody, In Search of the Castle (1981), pixelation is used as part of a wider range of effects. In a sense, the entire work tells the "story" of journeying into the digital realm in two senses of the word: For one, the footage is of a car journey through an urban landscape in New Mexico, where the Vasulkas moved at the turn of 1979/1980; for another, the image is increasingly more digitally deformed. Similarly, The Commission (1983), which will be further discussed later in this text, also includes sequences made with the Articulator: the multiplied hands and body of the dead Paganini in the video's opening sequence; the rapid switching between two video sources, when the elegant figure of Berlioz merges with the partially pixelated landscape and clouds; and in the final scene of Berlioz talking and playing the harmonica.

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Furlong, "State of the Art Scan• (see note 185).

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Observing observation While the Vasulkas were constructing and testing the Artic ulator. they also continued their Buttalo period of experimenting with "vision machines," one outcome of which was Steina's 1978 electric aloptical-mechanical installation series Machine Vision. The subject of observing oneself in the process of creating a work winds its way through Steina's entire body of work and is also explored in Vio lin Power (1978), one of the first attempts at combining video with a musical performance in which the image is moved by sound. In this piece, Steina explores the possibilities of distorting the video signal in real time using a synthesizer and a recording of herself playing the violin, with the subject of distortion being the image of her own body. A scan processor is used to vibrate the image surface, with the bow's movements across the strings producing visual ettects resulting from the image's deconstruction into lines. Images are simultaneously created, reconfigured by the device, and played on a monitor, and so the video tape documents its own creation. In Orbital Obsessions (1977), Steina plays a violin that has been connected to cameras on movable tripods. These record her playing her instrument while the image is distorted in a number of ditterent ways. The rotating camera offers a number of ditterent perspectives, and Steina creates additional image layers by using a mirror. Shot in the Vasulkas• Buttalo loft, Orbital Obsessions depicts Woody and Steina as part of the machine performance. At one point, Steina brings in another video monitor and walks with it past the camera. The performer thus moves within the space between the two cameras, using her body to test the limits of the electronic space. She also applies keying and horizontal drift (two sets of images moving horizontally on top of each other), changes back and forth between a positive and negative image. and uses other techniques. A rotating camera also appears in Urban Episodes (1980),188 which consists of footage of street performances recorded by a vision machine placed in the middle of Minneapolis - a 2.5-meter-long rotating beam with a mirror sphere in the middle, a camera on one end, and various reflective surfaces on the other. Driven by a battery, the machine slowly rotates with the camera zooming in on and out from the reflective surfaces as it records it s surroundings and the reflections of its surroundings, which rotate in various directions to create an impression of spatial confusion and abstract images. Each of the video's six pre-programmed "episodes..

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Urban Episodes, 1980, 8 .45 min

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was made using various combinations of the available equipment. The recorded footage from the streets of this Midwestern city was accompanied by real sounds of the street and of the machine in operation. In his book Discipline and Punish (published in 1975, i.e., around the same time that the Vasulkas were making these works),189 Michel Foucault describes Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, in which visibility is organized around an all -seeing perspective by organizing spatial units in a way that allows for constant observation. What is more, the probing gaze is internalized to the point that individuals subjected to this surveillance begin to apply it to themselves. So- called "surveillance installationsH190 became models for these negative aspects of surveillance, and their early era predates the later spread of public camera systems. In the video installations of artists such as Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, and Peter Weibel, viewers are presented with a spatial confusion that springs from an unpleasant confrontation with their own image, frequently deformed, delayed, or visible only from a physically uncomfortable position. These works turn Jacques Lacan's "mirror stage" on its head: According to lacan, when a child looks in a mirror, it identifies primarily with the external model. The subject, captivated by the magic of spatial identification, thus expands its understanding of its body from an incomplete form into a form encompassing its whole. This mistaken self-identification - the acceptance of wholeness because of an image - is thus always present. Lacan understood the "self" as an entity shaped through the "Other." The aforementioned installations are characterized by a paradoxical and cautionary return of this "Other" that prevents identification. Lacan also addressed the split between subject and object: The subject is previously created as the one who is observed, and this primal (projected, mental) gaze is felt as a threat.191 "Surveillance installations" produce a confrontation with the "subject transformed into object" and depicted by the surveilling gaze of the camera. If the observer sees herself immediately displayed by the video feedback, she combines this image of herself with her own mental state. A situation in which we are both observer and a part of the feedback questions the presumed distinction between (our own) observed behavior and a seemingly unobservable inner state. No wonder, then, that the

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Michel Foucault, Survei//er et p unir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). According to the film theorist Raymond Bellour, surveillance video enabled the first true deformation of objects and bodies and their transformation into something else. See Raymond Bellour, "The Double Helix; in ed. Timothy Druckrey, Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996), p. 181. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

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experience of being in a surveillance installation was described as an externalized presentation of the functioning of the consciousness. One example of a surveillance installation is Peter Campus's aen (1977), in which cameras placed at the level of the visitors' shoulders recorded them from the waist up. The cameras were connected to a projector that displayed the images in real time, enlarged and upside- down, onto the opposite wall of the darkened room. Visitors could see their somewhat eerie and blurred image only if they stood by the entrance to the darkened room. Another well- known example is Bruce Nauman's series of corridor installations, which he began making in the late 1960s. His 1970 Corridor Installation consists of six long corridors, three that one can just about squeeze through and three so narrow one can only look down them. At the end of one, there are two monitors placed on top of each other. At first, they both show the empty corridor, but after a while one displays the image of a visitor walking from behind, while the static image on the other remains unchanged. Visitors walking down the corridor are shot by a camera placed high above the entrance, opposite the monitors. If they turn around, the monitor shows their face, although they cannot see it at the time. In Peter Campus's installation the visitors' image appears only if they are standing in a comfortable place on the threshold to the room, but with Nauman they only see themselves from behind on the monitor: Once again, the emphasis is on an image of ourselves as something seen, from somewhere, by someone. Dan Graham gained fame for his mirrored rooms, installations that use closed circuit technology in combination with mirror w alls. One example is 1974's Present Continuous Past(s), which consists of a room with mirror walls and a monitor located at the center of one wall showing footage from a hidden camera. The monitor shows not only the viewer but the entire surrounding mirror space, thus producing an endless reflection. The viewer can see her face in the mirror, which by necessity leads her to alter her movements and facial expressions in response to what she sees. Other installations use time delay to evoke an intense awareness of oneself as observed, as actor. Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974) consists of two cameras placed on top of two monitors facing one another in a room fitted with two opposing mirrors (with each camera/monitor set placed in front of one of the mirrors). The cameras on the monitors are aimed at the mirror and, with a slight time delay, send their signal not to the monitor below them but to the one on the opposite side of the room. The resulting confusion of spatial perception and the visitor's responses to this situation become a part of the work. When a visitor stands between the mirror and the camera/monitor, the camera records her and her mirror image (in the absence of visitors, the camera records its own image in the mirror). After she has passed into the next room, the time delay still allows her to see her image on the opposite monitor. Since the mirrors face each other, the entire scene is reflected and repeated on the CH VIII

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infinitely receding images inside the mirror. The visitor can constantly c reate her own images, which she sees after walking over to the other side of the room, where she is again recorded and her image sent to the opposite monitor, and so on. She becomes an object caught in a c omplicatedly interconnected space, in a loop of her own depiction. At the same time, she is a subject trying to constantly "capture" (i.e., control) her own image.

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"Surveillance installations" can be interpreted in relation to the negative aspects of a felt gaze as a symbol of sur veillance technology (power, state, apparatus), but they can also be understood within the context of the possibilities of (technological) observation in general. The visual feedback causes the observer herself to be displayed, giving her the chance to see herself in the act of observing. In her installations, Steina Vasulka emphasizes the positive aspects of "mac hine vision" - by placing the camera on moving machine objects, she enters a realm in which she can explore a different, mechanical way of seeing. Similarly, in his work La Region Centrale (1970- 1971) the Canadian artist Michael Snow removed the human perspec tive by guiding the gaze through a specially constructed camera system. Snow's three-hour piece was shot in the Canadian mountains using a camera on a pedestal whose movements were programmed using a computer so that the camera turned in all directions. The resulting video produces an oppressive sense of disconnect between our vision and the displayed image. An important thing for Steina is a desire to explore what would otherwise remain hidden from the human eye. Vision is suddenly "liberated" from the perspective of the human eye, which has been stripped of its central position.192 As previously stated, a central theme of the Vasulkas' work was observing one's own act of observing, one's own thinking. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoietic systems 193 concerns itself w ith the cyclical nature of living systems and focuses on man in his role as observer. All knowledge must be qualified with a view to the given observer, since knowledge acquisition is a process involving the overall interactivity of observers. The observer engages in "distinction," meaning he delineates for himself a certain area of observation by defining its boundaries, thus separating it from its "bac kdrop." This act of delineation allows him to operate independently from the c irc umstances in which he himself exists. At the same time, he can never stand entirely on the outside, for he is always

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More information at http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Stelna_ AllVision/AllVision.html. Maturana and Varela descnbed this theory in, among other places, Autopoiesis and Cognmon: The rea/1sat1on of the living (Lancaster: D. Reidel, 1980). The 1970s saw the development of the study of self-organizational processes insp1red by the work of Heinz von Foerster, the founder of second- or der cybemet1cs.

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a part of the observation.194 So-called second order observation (observing the observer) is the subject of endophysics, which studies the non- existence of an outer, final observer and, by extension, the overall observation of the world. Endophysics explores what a system looks like when an observer becomes a part of it; it shows the extent to which objective reality depends on its observer. lmmersive model worlds exploring the relationships between the observer and the observed reality of whic h they are a part are a popular theme in science fiction and fantasy literature. In Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel, the fugitive narrator finds himself on a Pacific island whose mysterious inhabitants seem to be trapped in their own world, unaware of anything around them. The confused narrator falls in love with a beautiful dark-haired woman and decides to find out why nobody notices or wants to notice him. In the end, he discovers that the events on the island are the result of an invention by a certain Morel, who came up with a device that would endlessly repeat the events it recorded. The images are recorded by mirrors and perfectly synchronized with sound, touch, taste, smell, and warmth. The projection fills the entire space, and its characters move through the "normal" world as if a part of it, indistinguishable from living people. The observer eventually becomes a part of the recorded, virtual world, which he enters entirely of his own volition, letting himself be recorded by the apparatus so that he may enter the #story# by adapting his movements to the world of his beloved. In the end, he dies (enters into the image) as a result of having been recorded by the machine.195 Since the 1970s, creators of media installations have tried to produce model situations in which we can be both observer and observed. Towards the end of his Buffalo lectures, Woody speculated about the possibility of a new image in the form of a complex data structure containing all the events of our world, which he called the "active design of reality." But he also believed that we would first have to adapt the space in our vision to accommodate these new models of Hall-seeing." Later, in the early 1990s, Woody returned to the idea of a total space in "Toward a Non-Centric Narrative Space.n 196 His somewhat cryptic description of an ideal non-centric space lacking any defining point of view and existing in a process of constant coming into being was clearly inspired by his experience from working with digital image environments generated in real time. One example is his installation series The Brotherhood (1990- 1998) which consists of artificial all-directional spaces for the observation of constantly

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A good overview or the h sto ry o r systems ol sell- organlzahon can be round on Fnt1of Capra's The Web of Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1997) Adollo Bioy Casares. The Invention of Morel (New York; NYRB Classics, 2003). Vasulka, 1"oward a Non -Centnc Narrative Space· (see note 175)

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emerging events in an environment with certain elements of random behavior - and thus unpredictability - programmed into it . Further areas of artistic research presented themselves to Steina and Woody Vasulka in late 1979 and early 1980 when they moved to Santa Fe, a city nestled in the mountains of the American Southwest. Here, they found themselves in a region in which Native American culture met the history of the atom bomb, fertile ground for artists and scientists working together.

\rtOlrn Power (Steina, 1970-1978, 10:04 min .. black&wtiite. sound)

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Woody and Steina Vatulka in New Mexico

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The art of memory ,..·•

In the 1980s, the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States was accompanied by a gradual but radical cut in spending on the arts as a consequence of the newly emergent neoliberalism. The need to create autonomous spaces for artistic work that would function independently from public institutions thus gained in urgen cy. The Vasulkas' solution was to move to New Mexico, a state in the southwestern United States one corner of which borders Mexico. Specifically, they settled in the state's capital, Santa Fe, a plac e with a rich artistic history: In the 1920s and 1930s, the region had been home to the writers D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, the painter Georgie O'Keefe, and the photographer Ansel Adams, and more recently Santa Fe had become a popular location for filmmakers. In the second half of the 1970s, nearby Taos was home to a large hippie community, attracted by the favorable climate and the history of the native cultures. The region's favorable climate and remoteness also influenced the American government's decision to concentrate its team of scien tists working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos. To this day, Los Alamos National Laboratory engages in defense research and the local Bradbury Science Museum shows documentaries about the young, bright scientists' lives in Los Alamos and about how infinitely happy the local tamers and "Indians" were to be able to offer their lands for America's struggle against its enemies.197 It was a perfect place for studying the anthropology of war, which would be one of Woody Vasulka's areas of intere·st in the 1980s. Santa Fe itself was home to a lively artists' community, as represented by the Center tor Contemporary Arts, the SITE Santa Fe gallery (founded in the mid-1990s), and the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific, research, and educational center focused among other thing on studying complex natural, artificial, and social systems.198 One of the teachers at the College of Santa Fe, which was closed in 2018 due to financial reasons, was Gene Youngblood, who became a close friend of the Vasulkas and an interpreter of their work.

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See http://www.lanl.gov and http://www.lanl.gov/museum. The area around Los Alamos is also the site of the most reported UFO sightings in the entire United States. See http://www.santafe.edu. Recently, the institute has been criticized for the way it operates. For instance. Charlie Gere has written about how one of the Santa Fe lnstitute's sponsors is Citibank, as a result of which much of its research has focused on economics and on ways of dealing with global capital. Complexity studies can also serve as a way to legitimize neoliberal ideology. Charlie Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002), p. 143.

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In Santa Fe, the Vasulkas discovered an environment that w as favorably disposed to a contemplative way of life, towards "creative inactivity," as Woody stated in an interview with Ken Ausubel: HComing to Santa Fe is a retirement from the duties. I found out this isn't a community in which to compete, but rather to contemplate. It's a privilege to be able to contemplate your life, but it is more difficult to contemplate rather than simply to produce." 199 As with their earlier studios, the appearance of which has been captured in numerous photographs and people's descriptions, the Vasulkas immediately began to share their Santa Fe studio with their equipment. After visiting them in 1981, the New Mexico author Peter Cobel wrote that their studio looked more like a scientific laboratory than an artist's studio.200 The Vasulkas' enchantment with the visual stimuli of the desert landscape is reflected in the works they made during their first years in Santa Fe. Their studio, in which most of their experiments took place, gradually expanded to encompass the broader space of New Mexico. In Steina's Summer Salt (1982), 201 the earlier aspects of performance art, machine vision, and working with optical equipment mounted on the camera (as, for instance, in the street scenes from Urban Episodes) are further developed within the New Mexico landscape. In the video's section titled "Somersault," Steina has mounted a glass tube with a convex mirror onto a camera to provide a 360-degree view as she passes the camera between her legs or jumps over it. In "Sky High," a camera fitted with a round lens is mounted on the roof of a car and shows a circular cut-out of the sky and the horizon, and in "Low Ride," Steina drives through the desert with a camera on the bumper, the built-in microphone recording the sound of her automobile. In the sequence titled "Rest," she lets the camera rock back and forth in a hammock and digitally manipulates the trees it records, and the final section, "Photographic Memory," is a layering of multiple landscape shots that works with the contrast between moving and frozen analog and digital images. Steina's multi-monitor, dual-channel work The West (1983), for which Woody did the sound, reveals the dual nature of the New Mexico landscape: Shots of the radiotelescope systems at the Very

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Ken Ausubel, "Woody Vasulka: Experimenting With Visual Alternatives; News & Review, May 11, 1983, p. 8-9. See. e.g .. Peter Kobel. "Artist's Studio Achieves Look of Science Lab; Albuquerque Journal, 15 March, 1981, section 0, p. 1. Kobel warns his readers that the Va§ulkas' studio Is not like anything we are used to and that. with all its technology, It is an almost Intimidating sight. Summer Salt, 1982, 19:46 min.

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Large Array (VLA) astronomical observatory207 are confronted with sequences showing the Indian rock dwellings at Chaco Canyon. This footage is accompanied by images shot using a mirror sphere - a motif from her earlier installations. Steina splits the screens using a series of w ipes and variously layers the colored footage to make it even more unreal. The two video channels' images are rhythmically alternated or rearranged, for instance into a checkerboard pattern; the flowing of images from monitor to monitor is raised to a higher level of precision than any time before and presages Steina's later works involving the rhythmicization of images, usually applied to footage of landscapes and natural processes. The Machine Vision series also includes Ptolemy (1987), a four-channel video installation ideally played back on a 4 x 4 matrix of sixteen monitors with eight-channel audio. The work was named after the ancient astronomer C laudius Ptolemy, a proponent of the geocentric model of the solar system who believed that the earth was a sphere around which revolved the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. Similarly, Steina approached her studio in Santa Fe as the ·center of a polychronic, polytopic, and polyphonic universe that is spectacularly and often hilariously decentered.• In the video, Steina works with other combinations of human and non-human vision and demonstrates the possibilities of "non-centric• space using the camera to record space mechanically, with different levels of human intervention. Ptolemy consists of six sections charac terized by varying levels of complexity, with the camera moving slowly around the room in 360 degrees; handheld footage recording the space in choppy movements; shots of the courtyard with the camera facing the ground, created using a program that periodically freezes the image; two cameras rotating on a trio of mirror spheres; rapid, mechanical shots from left to right or up and down; and footage from a camera mounted on a robotic device designed by Woody that slowly scans in all directions, even recording itself. The camera was connected to an audio synthesizer that processed the original sounds of the camera's environment. in particular the sounds of the equipment itself, which is constantly present, both visibly and auditorily.'03 In 1987- 1988, Steina spent a residency in Tokyo, where- she shot sixty hours of footage that she used for her four- channel installation Tokyo Four. The video includes footage of a Zen garden, train conductors, elevator girls, a market. and a dance performance, all of it arranged into a complex and meticulously synchronized audiovisual composition, with footage played backwards or at various speeds. The video Voic e Windows (1986) was made in collaboration with

202 203

Tho observatory consllla of 27 redlO toloscopos that racol~ rodlo wovo1 lrom plonott. llata. end galoxioa. Gono Youngblood. "Multlacroon M usic: Tho Video lnsto11011on1 ot S1olnn Vasulka; In ron11sr 6 IJO/Sk)6m video lnnsetn.ngar Sreinu Vasulk• (Reykjavik · K1orvol111&01r Llllasntn Roykjav1kur. 1966). p. 18

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Woody Vasulka working on Art of Memory, 1985. Photo: Steina

Steina Va~ulka while shooting Art of Memory, Las Vegas. New Mexico. 1985. Photo: Woody Va~ulka

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The Va~ulkas at their Agua Fria StudJO. Santa Fe. New Mexico. rrud-1980s

P.164- P.165-+ The West. an electro/opto/mecharvcal environment by Stema (from 1983). exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco. 1996

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t he vocalist Joan la Barbara, w hose real -t ime singing controlled the patterns on one of two interwoven images to c reate a visual trace in the fo rm of five ho rizontal lines - a reference to musical scores. Here, too, Steina used footage of the New Mexico landscape, w ith the voc alist's voice literally opening up one image w ithin the other. In their purity, the d irect and c learly observable relationship between audio and video and the visible shaping of one by the other recall the Vasulkas' early work. Footage from the video was also used fo r the performanc e Vocal Window, whic h La Barbara presented that same year at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe. For the performance, the vocalist influenced the footage in real time using Mark Coniglio and Morton Subotnick's lnteractor software program. Steina later reworked the video into the multi- channel installation Vocalization (1990).20• After moving to Santa Fe, Steina began to focus on multi- monitor compositions. Analogous to musical compositions, they involved working with visual material in a manner similar to the composition of musical works. A key role was played by the recording process: Steina exclusively used her own recorded material, in many cases modified during the recording process using various tools or techniques. Nearly all the recordings were made by Steina herself, followed by a process of image manipulation reminiscent of playing a musical instrument: "Between taping and editing, there is usually an intermediary step during which I alter and mix the images, change color, or run things upside down or backward. Th is is where the particular uniqueness of working with the electronic image comes into play. It is somewhat akin to photographic darkroom techniques, but it really reminds me of playing an instrument. I change style, timbre, dynamics, and key in an improvisational and spontaneous way.'' 205 Working with various chronological structures of multiplied video images also represented an important step towards overcoming the limitations of following a single timeline: HMultichannel composit ions liberate me from this concern with speed, since they rely on d ifferent time principles and are therefore more like music.H 206 Steina's audiovi-

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https://www.londation-langlois.org/htm1/e/page.php?NumPage• 466. Steina Vasulka. "My Love Affair With Art: Video and Installation Work; in ed. Judy M alloy. Women. Art, and Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2003), p. 110. The essay was lirst published in Leonardo 28. no. 1 (1995>: p. 15-18 Ibid., p . 111.

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sual spatial mstallations \YOrk w ith rhythm1c12ed mu't1pl•ed reoea:1ng images Most of them were made using recordings of nalvral processes (flowing water. lava. fire) shot in Santa Fe and m Steina·s native Iceland, with the aud1ov1su.al matenal reorganized by ll1pp•ng 11 and speechng 1t up or stowing 1t down One important mstallat1on from the penod around the .a:e '980~ and early 1990s 1s Geoman1a 11989), which combines footage o• volcanic and oceanic processes in Iceland w ith desert processes from the Southwest The dual channel pro1ectt00 'or thiee screenc; consists of tnangular images on a black bacl\ground that are 1n:er • connected to form two overlapping parallelograms and are bent 1n:o two different shapes along their honzontal axes An earlier verst0n from 1987 took the form of a video matnx consisting of a pyiamtd ot ten monitors. Borealis (1992-1993)· - 1s a large-format dual-channel installation placed m a darkened room with two pro1ectors whose images, split by mirrors into lour beams, are cast onto four translucent screens so that they are visible on both sides (v1srtors can walk freely from one side to the other). The footage consists of ·etectron>Carty reorchestrated images of flowmg water 1n Iceland The water flows vertically, forward and back, and at vanous speeds in an 1mmersrve rhythm. Pyroglyphs (1995) was made in collaborabon wrth the Santa Febased blacksmith Tom Joyce It depicts work wrth fire. the sounds forming the basis for the work's visual composition. Stema was fas0

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cinated by fire as a medium capable of transforming other matenals The video is a documentary-style depictt0n of vanous aspects of blacksmithing. The editing was guided by the Video's audio traclc. mod1f1ed by Steina using a number of drfferent tools (harmonizers, phasers, or resonance circuits for creating echo effects). An eponymous installation from the 1990s worked with a senes of monitors arranged m a semicircle.zag Also 1n the mne11es. Stema created the mstallat1on Orka (1997), which exists in a single-channel version and a three -channel pro1ection for three translucent screens. The video shows black-and-white and color footage of loaming water. deformed mto unnaturally distorted shapes. with this deformation of the electronic image causing subtle shahs m the real images that emphasize the diverse ways 1n which w ater or lava can flow. Other footage o f birds m the sky 1s altered using a •tracer• to freeze the birds' positions dunng their lhght and thus construct ever more

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