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The Kitchen
Venue: The Venue
Time: 10 am
Woody and Steina Vasulka will introduce and contextualise a series of rarely seen documentary video clips profiling New York’s seminal media arts organisation and venue, The Kitchen. Founded in 1971 by the Vasulka’s, The Kitchen helped foster the careers of many innovative avant-garde artists including Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne with The Talking Heads, Robert Longo, Peter Greenaway, Dana Reitz, Meredith Monk, Brian Eno, Elizabeth Streb, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer. Through artistic exploration and education, The Kitchen today continues to provide a unique testing ground for artists pushing the accepted boundaries and definitions of contemporary culture. This programme was curated for Evolution by Stephen Vitiello, electronic musician, sound artist and archivist at The Kitchen.
Links:
www.thekitchen.org (The Kitchen website)
www.vasulka.org/kitchen (historical documents, video clips, images)
The Listening Post, Ben Rubin
Venue: The Venue
Time: 11.15 am
Ben Rubin will present examples of his recent works including a public art commission for the Adobe building in San Jose, a recently completed work entitled Spin, and collaborations with Diller and Scofidio, Mark Hansen, Ann Hamilton, Arto Lindsay and Steve Reich. Working with sound, video, and digital electronics, New York-based multimedia artist and sound designer Ben Rubin creates performances, installations, and architectural projects. His most recent work, The Listening Post (2002, with Mark Hansen), shown at the Whitney Museum earlier this year has been described as, ‘a biorhythmic visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication’.
Links:
www.earstudio.com
Sketches, Woody and Steina Vasulka
Venue: The Venue
Time: 1.30 pm
Woody and Steina Vasulka will present a rare retrospective screening and lecture of their enormously influential video work and discuss the melding of conceptual and technical processes involved in its making. As productive today as they were in the early 1970s, Santa Fe-based artists Woody and Steina Vasulka are widely acknowledged as seminal figures in the development of video as an art form. For over thirty-five years they have comprehensively explored the materiality of the video medium and the electronic image to produce a vast archive of experiments and sketches using an array of diverse techniques and specially developed equipment.
Links:
www.vasulka.org (artists website featuring archival images, video clips, documents)
Points, Wojciech Bruszewski
Curated and introduced by Mark Webber (LUX Project Manager and independent curator of artists’ film & video)
Venue: The Venue
Time: 4 pm
Wojciech Bruszewski will discuss the theories behind his works, screen examples of his pioneering films and videos, and present his film performance Points (1976). Wojciech is one of Poland’s foremost media artists, for over thirty years he has been active in the fields of theory and practice, using film, video, photography, computers and language to create audio-visual works and installations that frequently examine the phenomena of sight and perception. Much of his early work in video examines the immediate relationship between camera, monitor and viewer made possible by instant playback technology. Works include: The ‘Music of Behaviours’ (1982), Glasses (1982), Match Box (1975, 5 mins), Outside (1975), Oliver’s Train (1988), TV Music (1979) and YYAA (1973, 3 mins).
Links:
www.voytek.pl (artists website)
Violin Power the Performance, Steina Vasulka
Participation by Woody and Steina Vasulka
Introduced by Woody and Steina Vasulka
Venue: The Venue
Time: 7.30pm
For the first time in the UK, Steina Vasulka will conduct a live performance of Violin Power (1992–present). Using a midi violin and customised software, on-screen video images are manipulated in real-time according to the notes played by Steina on the instrument. The performance will be followed by a screening of Participation (1969–71, 62 mins). This pioneering video document is a free-form time capsule representing the Vasulka’s experience of the New York downtown scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this fascinating portrait of wildly creative people, places and times, the artists use the early Sony Portapak video system to document, among others, Don Cherry performing in Washington Square, Warhol Superstars on stage, and Jimi Hendrix in concert.
Links:
www.vasulka.org (artists website featuring archival images, video clips, documents)