Vasulka, Woody und Steina

Steina Vasulka
b 1940 Reykjavik (IS); studied languages and music at the music conservatory in Prague (CZ); since 1969 experimentation with electronic media; 1995 Siemens Medienkunstpreis at the Multimediale 4. Lives since 1980 in Santa Fe (USA).


Woody Vasulka
b 1937 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He studied at the School of Industrial Engineering in Brno and the Academy of Performing Arts Faculty of Film and Television in Prague. After producing a pioneering body of tapes in collaboration with Steina Vasulka since 1969 in the USA, Woody Vasulka has investigated the narrative, syntactical and metaphorical potential of electronic imaging. His development of an expressive image-language began as a rigorous deconstruction of the materiality of the electronic signal, and has evolved to the application of imaging codes and digital manipulation to narrative strategies and a series of interactive installations in the 1990s. His professional career led him from New York City, where he co-founded the experimental center «The Kitchen,» via Buffalo, New York, with its Experimental TV Studio to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has lived with Steina since 1981.

The Vasulkas emigrated to the United States in 1965, and began their collaborative exploration of electronic media in 1969. In 1971, they co-founded The Kitchen, a major alternative exhibition and media arts center in New York. From 1973 to 1979, the Vasulkas lived and worked in Buffalo, New York, where they were faculty members at the Center for Media Study, State University of New York. The Vasulkas have received numerous awards for their work in the media arts, including grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 1989, they received a United States/Japan Exchange Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

(source: http://www.eai.org)