Summer Open: Prints & Archive

This summer Vašulka Kitchen Brno presents selection from the series Lucifer’s Commission by Woody Vašulka. The digital prints are accompanied by an interactive installation of the archival project A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape, developed by curator and artist Chris Hill.

The exhibition, prepared by the VKB team, invites visitors to explore video and new media art, and encourages reflection on the Vašulkas’ commitment and desire to experiment with technologies, media and ideologies.

Woody Vašulka: Lucifer’s Commission
A series of scans of computer circuit boards that Woody Vasulka discovered in various stages of destruction in a warehouse in the backyard of his Santa Fe home. Hardware prints, evoking an encyclopedia of digital device components, form a counterbalance to the moving and procedural audiovisual works of The Vašulkas. We can also read them as diagrams showing the hidden workings of machines.

1977-2003 (2016)
digital prints series
100 × 100 cm, 14 x
on the property of the association VKB

Chris Hill: A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape
This digital map is intended as a navigational tool for the Vašulka Kitchen Archive, offering multiple pathways to investigate the media art work, cultural projects, and archive of Steina and Woody Vašulka (Steinnum Briem Bjarnadottir, b. 1940; and Bohuslav “Woody” Vašulka, 1937–2019). The Vašulkas’ research and art are foundational to the understanding of media art history and especially electronic media art that evolved in the intense cultural climate of the late 1960s. Steina and Woody arrived in New York City from Europe in 1965 and, following the introduction of the light-weight analog (Sony) Portapak (late 1960s), shared their technological explorations and a visionary commitment to the medium of video with other early practitioners. About this period, when many artists were bound up with structural investigations of materials, both Woody and Steina have remarked upon two critical discoveries they made working with video—that images could be produced without a camera, and that electronic sounds and images were produced by the same materials (voltages and frequencies).