Vasulka-Squared

August 27, 2008
6:00 pm	to	8:00 pm
September 3, 2008
6:00 pm

Woody Vasulka finishes his retrospective at Santa Fe Complex with the second conversation on the changing relationship between art and technology over his 40-year career, each decade of which represents a distinct phase in the evolution of that relationship, says Vasulka. “It has been a dialogue with the machine that began in the political environment of the 60s with a time of continual interaction within an art community,” he explains. The first conversationwill occur at Santa Fe Complex at 6:00 on August 27. Vasulka will return for the second talk a week later on September 9.

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.”

That almost communal time of social and artistic experimentation faded as computer-generated graphics overwhelmed art with hyhperrealistic images and an emphasis on the technical rather than the artistic elements of creativity. As “the idea of realism slowly came to dominate art in the digital era,” Woody says, “the image itself took the dominant function and the contextual information lost its importance.” As a result, art became dominated by computer needs like resolution and color spaces rather than the artist’s vision.

The irrepressible artist believes the hyperrealistic phase is fading. He offers his “Dialogue with the Machine,” which is how Vasulka refers to his coming talks at Santa Fe Complex, as a return to a more collaborative and experimental community.

In fact, he says that technology will expand 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.

The process has begun, according to Woody. Santa Fe 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.

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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 his website.

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Santa Fe Complex is located next to the Railyard Art District and within walking distance of the hotels, restaurants and shops at the plaza downtown. Parking is available via Romero St. in one of two ways:

• Take Romero St. southbound (it’s one-way) from Agua Fria. When it opens into a two-way road, turn right into our parking lot.
• Take Manhattan north from St. Francis. Turn right onto Romero St. when Manhattan ends at the railyard. Continue on Romero until you reach the do no enter signs (where it becomes one way) and turn left into the parking lot.