The Vasulkas' Demos of the 1970s & their Performance of Personal Archives

Chris Hill, who was a student of the Vasulkas at SUNY Buffalo in the early 1980s and also curator of Surveying the First Decade a collection of early U.S. video art and alternative media (1996), will speak about the Vasulkas' "dialogues with tools" in their work of the 1970s and early 1980s. Her talk will feature excerpts from Steina's Violin Power, an ever-evolving project that was first performed with an analog violin, later with a MIDI-controlled violin, and now samples work from five decades. She will also discuss Woody's Art of Memory (1986) that references his early film studies at FAMU, and later his innovative use of the Rutt-Etra, a device with which he "unhinged" the video frame and contributed radical insight into the distinctions between celluloid film and electronic video.

Chris Hill is a media curator, artist and educator, who is currently teaching and Associate Dean in the Film/Video School at California Institute for the Arts. She taught at FaVU (Brno) in the mid-1990s, and then Antioch College (Ohio) where she co-directed four Summer Documentary Institutes including one (with Keiko Sei) on Post-1989 Documentaries in East Central Europe (2000). Hill received an MFA in Media Study from SUNY Buffalo (1984), and from 1984-96 was Video Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo. Hill curated a 17-hour video art collection Surveying the First Decade (1996) that has been distributed to museums and universities internationally by the Video Data Bank. Her recent publications and media work have investigated documentary media on the U.S. incarceration crisis, contemporary artists’ work that re-embodies experimental film and grassroots video projects of the early 1970s, tactical media initiatives in response to an educational community emergency, and beekeeping.