Ralph and I first met you and Woody, your filmmaker husband, in 1971 in New York. We were investigating this new medium of video, along with a small group of other artists.
To set the cultural stage: Happenings, kinetic art, light shows, experimental music, conceptual art, mixed media performances, avant-garde film, process art, minimalism, materiality. All of the artists arrived at video from other arts disciplines—you from music, Woody from film, Ralph from photography and pottery. Others came from contemporary dance, experimental theater and the literary arts, or philosophy, religion and the sciences. There were no native-born electronic visual imaging artists. We were all immigrants.
To set the socio-political stage: the Vietnam war; political unrest, social campaigns for gender and racial equality, free speech, equal representation; sit-ins, protests at the universities, political activism ranging from passivism to violence. Public funding for the arts. Communes and collectives. Government-sustained programs for the well-being of citizens. A shared recognition of the importance of public support for the arts, education, and science.
In addition to this new art form itself, we were simultaneously inventing the institutions that could support it. You and Woody were at work creating The Kitchen, along with Dimitri Devyatkin, Andy Mannik, Michael Tschudin, Rhys Chatham, and Shridhar Bapat, among others. Ralph was transforming his Binghamton University–based Student Experiments in Television begun in 1969 into the independent nonprofit the Experimental Television Center, which by 1971 was based in a loft space in downtown Binghamton, an upstate New York community midway between Manhattan and Buffalo. The Kitchen’s primary program was exhibition. ETC offered studio residencies for artists and a research and development program, as well as workshops and other educational opportunities for the community around the region.
We were also inventing tools. The commercially-available primary instrument of video—the Portapak—was heavy, initially limited to black and white recording only (playback required a second deck), a limited battery capacity, and was relatively expensive; editing was initially physical and, when editing decks were introduced, rather imprecise. Commercial video equipment which expanded considerably on the range of possible imagery, devices such as mixers, switchers, and keyers were prohibitively expensive. Artists envisioned video images which had not yet been created. They partnered with technicians to realize these new systems which could bring these imaginings into the real world; they adapted and hacked existing tools and borrowed instruments from other arts and sciences such as oscilloscopes, audio generators, and synthesizers to bend images, warp frames, disrupt time-base, and to control various parameters of the image such as color or shape. Prerecorded images were created for specific sites and often involved sculptural elements or multiple monitor displays.
This was the environment of the new video works. There was no roadmap, no codification of the history, no stars, no acceptance by the art world. We were free to invent ourselves and our artform.
Ralph invited you and Woody to present work at the ETC in Binghamton in November of 1971. It was this visit that got us evicted from our loft space and prompted us to embark on a 50-year-long renovation of a small and rather ramshackle farmhouse in rural Tioga County, turning it into a home, a video processing studio, and a meeting place for several generations of media artists.
The Vasulka public exhibition attracted the university communities and local filmmakers, musicians, dancers and photographers. You and Woody broadcast live images in real-time and screened your videotapes on multiple monitors around the loft space. For people to see their own faces on tv was then an extraordinary event. All the rest of your work was astounding to the audience. To the best of my memory you showed a range of tapes. Participation contained documentary-style footage from the 1969–70 downtown art scene in New York: Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis. Other works such as Studies and Sketches involved processed imagery and abstraction, along with electronic sound/music.
A lively discussion of the aesthetics of this new medium followed, an exploration of its essential grammar and syntax, and one of many which delved into the definitions of an art form.
