From Moravia with Love

Pioneering digital artist Woody Vasulka brings a retrospective exhibit and three work sessions to the complex in August and September. His show opens on Wednesday, August 13; his workshops will follow through the next month. The retrospective revisits a generation of “continual interaction within an art community,” according to Woody, which was lost as “the idea of realism slowly came to dominate art in the digital era.” The irrepressible artist believes the hyperrealistic phase is fading. He offers this exhibit as a bridge between the earlier period it represents and modern trends. Woody’s show begins at 5:00 pm.

He explains, “We were looking for images that were not derived from the world in this earlier work. It was a generation of continual interaction between technology and art where we were learning, demonstrating, and building in a community of with a network of interests.”

Vasulka believes the hyperrealistic phase is fading once again and offers this exhibit as a bridge between the earlier period it represents and modern trends. Artists like Corey Metcalf and David Stout, he says, are heirs to the Vasulka traditions. They show that modern digital processes, once again, allow a reinterpretation of sound and sight.

It’s all part of a “Dialogue with the Machine,” which is how Vasulka refers to his coming talks at Santa Fe Complex. Instead of a perspective where art is dominated by computer needs like resolution and color spaces — and where “the image itself takes the dominant function and the contextual information loses its importance” — Vasulka looks forward to returning to a dialogue with the culture we know mediated, admittedly, by the technology of today.

In fact, he says that technology will expands the artist’s horizons. Asking “is it the tool that limits you.” Vasulka calls the computer a variation machine that will let artists leap beyond historic constraints. In the 70s, he says, artists asked, “What happens between the frames?” and “Why 24 frames per second and not 1000?” Today, with the variation machine, they can begin to answer those questions and more.

Woody pioneered video art in the late 1960s. Born in Brno, now in the Czech Republic, he trained as an engineer before studying television and film production at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He met his wife, Steina Vasulka, in the early 1960s and moved to New York City in 1965, where he worked as a multiscreen film editor, experimenting with electronic sounds and stroboscopic lights while pioneering the showing of video art at the Whitney Museum. Woody collaborated with Don MacArthur and Jeffrey Schier in 1976 to build a computer controlled personal imaging facility called The Digital Image Articulator. The Vasulkas have been based in Santa Fe since 1980. More information is available at http://vasulka.org/index.html