Woody Vasulka
Born Bohuslav Peter Vasulka in Brno, Czechoslovakia in
1937. He and Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir,
met in Prague in the early 1960's. They moved to New
York City in 1965, where they founded The Kitchen, a
media arts theater with Andres Mannik in 1971, while
undertaking their own collaborative investigations on the
nature of video and sound.
While faculty at the Center
for Media Study at the state University of New York in
Buffalo om 1974, Woody turned his attention to the
analog Rutt/Etra Scan Processor and in 1976 to the Digital
Image Articulator which introduced him to digital
imaging. Since 1980, the Vasulkas have lived and worked
in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
They collaborated on an
exhibition that unearthed and displayed working models
of early electronic tools at Ars Electronica in Linz in 1992.
In 1996, their showMachine Culture included a series
of installations and videos, including Woody's "Theater
of Hybrid Automata" (1990) "The Brotherhood (1994-96)
and the videos The Commission" (1983) and
"The Art of Memory" (1987)
--Drawn from Robert R. Riley and Maria Sturken,
Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Media
(Exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Modern
ARt, Feb.2-March 31, 1996).
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