Woody Vasulka- artist


"I don't believe in images. I think they don't have anything to do with my life."
(links for Woody Vasulka)

What kind of role pictures play in your professional field?

I have always looked at my images as artefacts

I don’t know if you got the right question because I stopped relating to images about 12 years ago.
I have never established an intimate relationship to painterly images, I could never paint or draw. In grade school I was so unlucky to sit with a guy who could really draw and paint. I looked at him and said “shit, you can’t get even close to this guy”. Well, I discovered photography and its certain kind of drawing. Nevertheless, I have always looked at my images as artefacts. Besides, my priority wasn’t in the visual but in music and poetry.

Do you see a relation between poetry and working poetically with code?

“a drowning in the moment”: a transcendental shift from the sequence of words to the abstraction of the poetic essence

In an assumption, let me say that poetry has its own code. If you have a look at paintings and poetry, the painting often looks like a prescription to the poetry, but it is not poetry. Poetry happens in your mind where it lives as a very tightly guarded closed system. Poetry is an indefinable object, it doesn’t have its physical existence. A sound of a voice can bring its dominant features to the poetry and then perhaps even change the character or the content itself. Of course it mostly reaches us as a written text and everybody has to change the text to an inner or oratory voice. Although the poetry is coded in words, the mind evokes its essential form of a transition, experienced. The best description to this miracle I found in my early days was in the words of a Czech literate where he describes it as “a drowning in the moment”, in the Czech language simple three words, but they break the barrier of poetics on its own, sounding ominous, ultimate and terminal.
Although not practising poetry in its literary form since changing my mode of thinking to the English language, I still rely on the “poetic principle” as a guiding instinct in whatever I do. On the other hand, very early on, I acquired the determination to detach myself from the tight Czech aesthetic embrace, so sweet and irresistible, perhaps to find and mark a new and different territory.

You mentioned your pictorial discovery by photography. Do you see a difference between the mechanical image processing of photography and the computer based imaging process?

What we call the Imperial View of the camera has impregnated our consciousness, perpetuating clichés about what our world is.


"The Putney"

There are all kinds of photography. The camera photography usually deals with the pinhole principle extended into the lens arrangement. Once the camera captures the world and captivates the world’s attention, people got completely mesmerized by the moving image. Our perception agrees so much with this illusion of apparent motion, suggested by the film apparatus that humankind has accepted this abstract cinematic space as its own. What we call the Imperial View of the camera has impregnated our consciousness, perpetuating clichés about what our world is.

But I had a zero interest in television. Naturally, I came to television through electronic sound, a sound synthesizer named Putney. A portable half inch video recorder had just appeared and an activity known as Video Art sprang up from nowhere. So, the first level of discussion was with film, then with new video tools and then with display. That’s how The Kitchen was born. But this was happening in the middle of the exploding youth culture. There was a plenty of audience.

What about the digital techniques?

the digital code began to sweep away the traditional image and sound making
- it is a very different kind of arrangement in the structural and even more in the operational sense.

In the second half of the seventies we spent all our time building digital tools and learning the code. Here was another mystery to break into. At the beginning of the eighties, it was over. The digital world had arrived.
The television did not contribute to the pinhole principle at all, just inherited it. It was not an original extension of the medium, except to re-organize movies to be transmitted electronically. When I came to the analogue world of television I started to work with that canvas differently. Video gave us some possibility in internal imaging like feedback, a source of an image independent from the outer space of light and shadow, pushing the pinhole principle of image making to a second plane. And we got the waveforms, a gift from a previous experience of generating audio.
In the same decade, the decade of the seventies, the digital code began to sweep away the traditional image and sound making. As everybody probably knows by now, it is a very different kind of arrangement in the structural and even more in the operational sense. I felt that the imposition of such a difficult art making strategy on the artistic community was and still is a devising moment in creative practises.

How did you benefit from the digital experience?

The question of Microesthetics: What happens between two frames?

To say it dramatically, I suddenly understood the banal truth of the method by which the technology gains and occupies the time/space. By the action of chopping time into smaller and smaller divisions, each provides just the tiniest moment for its desired activity: changing a logical state of the machine. Underneath there is a whole poetic principle in a single question: what happens between the frames or better yet, what happens between two frames? Actually I call this question a question of Microesthetics.

What about mathematics in computer based imaging?

Once you touch the code you are entering a specific garden of varieties, because code can be in a continuous transformation, the computer has an infinite ability to make variations.

There are two major components of a digital computer: the Central Processing Unit, CPU, and the Arithmetic Logic Unit, ALU. Of course it is the logic state that runs the machine: But it is not really the numbers as we know them, once they are about to leave the machine they get re-coded, to mean something to us. We people communicate through numbers we have invented. Then other devices can do other code exchanges, numbers for letters, colour, voices and music and finally the images in an illusion of reality, representing the world or other worlds in an unmatched familiarity. Once you touch the code you are entering a specific garden of varieties, because code can be in a continuous transformation, the computer has an infinite ability to make variations. It is the same material for sound, image, colour and movement, subjected to some kind of logical transformations that are made to move the logical states of the machine. In that case it is the world that you emulate by strategies like the Renaissance perspective space made through electro-mechanical devices. Then each point on the screen is subjected to the transformation of Renaissance Perspective algorithm on an XYZ matrix.

What about the abstraction that implicates the use of mathematics: It is fascinating how omnipotent mathematics become by the process of formalisation. But what is the price we pay for?

algorithms as untouchable area: You can’t open a box to modify it and thereby change the image

Mathematics are magical, no doubt about it, and not totally impenetrable, even young children can make use of it. It is that kind of empirical status of mathematics which is so powerful, even in simple mathematics like a number +1. But algorithms also constitute an untouchable area. You can’t open a box to modify it and thereby change the image, like we used to do in video. So it becomes the domain of a different hierarchy, the hierarchy of the software. You can no longer physically touch this kind of an art object.

As technical process image production became a collaborative process. Arts and music still have a strong component of authorship. How do you behave as an artist?

The computer is such an attack on everything.


"study" from 1993

I was exposed to that very early. As a Czech, I come from a very long tradition of Bohemian art appreciation. I was a part of the radical generation emerging in the sixties. We instinctively looked at the system, replacing it with something personal or generational. This prescription comes from the late modern movement. But the war in a certain way interrupted this, because the war became more surrealistic than the surrealists. So this value of art diminished a bit.
Then the mechanical era truly opened new possibilities. The computer is such an attack on everything. We are still captive because we don’t know where it leading us. That time it was the generation’s call to look for what an electronic music or an electronic image is. There was this simple Paik prescription of doing first music with the machine, then images and video. So we always looked for “what’s the next?” and we had such a “next” for 10 or 15 years – it was a true adventure. There was even no interest in looking back, you just wanted to separate yourself from all traditions as far as possible. But in the middle of your live you have to say, “wait a minute, what’s that all about”? I had this crisis of image when I was about 52. Even as I went back to make images with the computer I called them studies, I wouldn’t call it art. You have to make your life into an object so you can observe it.

Isn’t there a difference in acceptance of a medium how artists look at electronic images and musicians at electronic music?

Jazz has challenged every intellectual discipline: the phenomenal idea of improvisation and a social environment that unlike notated music can never be re-enacted.

The last century produced large quantities of that kind of electronic music, but that music seems to have disappeared. Even now when I try to listen to the radio, there is no way to get to hear a Xennakis, not even once a week. It is regretful and I believe that the electronic music and film were a fantastic contribution to the 20th century art. But there was also Jazz, one of the most sophisticated forms of music. In spite of being originally folk music, Jazz has challenged every intellectual discipline. There was this phenomenal idea of improvisation with quality, depth, technique, improvisation and a social environment that unlike notated music can never be re-enacted. I see Jazz as an extraordinary contribution to the modern movement in the last century, which was the experimental century with an astonishing future.

We talked about content that can be transformed in all different kind of media. Do you also see formal parallels between images and music?

In an acoustic time space you can’t really analyze what is happening in a frame.

Between Steina and me, we use the word sound instead of music. When you make video audible the material is sound. Above all, in an acoustic time space you can’t really analyze what is happening in a frame. Every frame is superimposed by the next and you can only read the envelope.
The visual and the audible are different domains of perception, you can’t just make them linear. We did, because our priority was to state that it is the same material, just differently organized. We were intent in showing that the magic comes not from film or industrial video, but from the material itself. It is a Marxist idea that the god is in the matter and the ideas are the devil. It turns the Greek ideas of beauty and aesthetics around.

What about synaesthetics fusing senses?

The idea of uniting audiovisual aesthetics is so obsolete.

The idea of unification, of uniting audiovisual aesthetics is so much at hand, yet so untouchable and unusable. But every new generation gets tempted. Since antiquity the idea of aesthetic translation working with or against the other has been repeated. You can eventually come to some sort of polyphony or contrapoint of colour, sound and rhythm, like the simplistic idea of Skriabins colour organ. But the audio world is so developed, it has no use for such kind of stuffs – it is so obsolete.
If you can build higher codes, some sort of relationship could be built. With the coding ability changing one code to another you could build a higher code. But the strategy of building higher codes is not very well understood.

Did the quality of images change in the web?

moving image as a system of syntax: how the proceeding connects to the succeeding – that is the threshold of my interest.

They are no longer really images. They don’t even have the desire to be symbolic. In the western hemisphere, images are perceived as iconic or symbolic signs. I learnt that in the orient it is not the case. They don’t have a Madonna or a Christ with their hierarchy of symbols behind them. Therefore Paik's idea that images are like tones where you can use images like musical collages is crazy, because western people look for a symbolic meaning in an image intending to deconstruct it.
I grew up with still images, but I am marginally interested in them. I honour the moving image as a system of syntax: how the proceeding connects to the succeeding – that is the threshold of my interest.

How do you see the relation of man and machine?

a peculiarly intimate moment - when the machine gives the code to the human consciousness,

The worlds of machine and mind enter into a dialog for a split moment. This is the moment when the machine gives the code to the human consciousness, a peculiarly intimate moment. I am not really talking about the roll in preparation of the image by the agent interested in applying the strategy of persuasion or information, I am talking about images contained and mediated under a different strategy, of unknown purpose and unknown principle in an abstract form, perhaps only understandable to an alien.
The world in front of the mind is there to observe the screen, the event, but the opposite vector, the one which points to your mind ends somewhere in the visual cortex, in perhaps an unrecognisable format, in a code, a format, a morphology, observed and decoded. Our final self being not unlike a visitor in the theatre watching a filmic melodrama.

This is media art – what about art images in general?

What fascinates me is how much we do live with images that we don’t really respect or focus on.

What fascinates me is how much we do live with images that we don’t really respect or focus on.
If you invite curators to look at your work they don’t really look at your work. They look a little bit on it, than they bumble “this is a mature work” or some such idiocy – they look on it just to have some opinion, but they don’t have an intuitive look.
I have always thought of myself as a practitioner. At times I would be a blue-collar worker and some times white collar. But after all I was born a machinist. Scholarship and art practice have a bipolar relationship pulling the creative process apart, one insisting on everyday enthusiasm of making, the other dwelling in profound depths of scepticism. To keep oneself believing in the transcendental power of art one must encounter the experience a t least twice a year, otherwise it may slip away from your mind forever. I keep no fixed stable of heroes in my mind, my pictorial life is a continuous state of discovery and rediscovery. I have a tendency of dwelling on a style or a period, but I rely on re-visitations of those that in some way have already touched me.

What is your favourite image at home?

I never hung one picture on my wall.
El Greco
I don’t believe in images,...

It is very hard to say. At the moment El Greco is an interesting painter for me. Recently I found a book and re-discovered certain civic tendencies well beyond the religious and royal themes of his work I knew from before. But this re-visitation will go away making room for a next revelation. I know about pictures. But I keep them very much away from my live. I never hung one picture on my wall. But I can keep a sculpture around me like a mechanical or rubber thing.
I don’t believe in images, I don’t think they have anything to do with my life. I just like to discover them by accident. All my visits to the museums are unplanned. And then I mostly look at old friends, pictures I saw when I was six. It is not my world even though I produced thousands of images electronically.

interview by Tim Otto Roth from 1st March 2005 at ZKM Karlsruhe

Links for Woody Vasulka:
www.vasulka.org 

Publications:
(with Steina)

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