Woody and Steina Vasulka are veterans of video and media art. This documentary sketches, in a straight forward style, the development of their works and the relationship that they have with each other because of, or despite, art. In a short space of time, you get an impression of how the two, precisely by staying faithful to their own fascinations, challenge and compliment each other. They got to know each other in communist Czechoslovakia of the sixties. The first thing that Woody said to Icelandic Steina who was travelling through the country was: "Will you marry me and take me away from here?" They settled as an artistic duo in New York where they developed a sort of recording mania. They made self-willed video documents of all cultural events as an escape from the artist's idiom of the 'classical' avant-garde of the time. For a long time, their kitchen was a kind of meeting place and open laboratory for artists and freaks who kept breezing in. In the meantime, the somewhat older couple have withdrawn to New Mexico where they live almost like farmers. They don't however tend animals, they tend equipment. As careful farmers talk about their animals, so they say somewhere: "The machines need us to live". A life completely devoted to the development and investigation of the possibilities of technology. In building their own technical tools, they search for the moment when they can amalgamate with the spirit and creativity lying within the machines themselves. They have so much respect for these schemes of the human spirit gone independent, that they treat them almost like their own children. Woody is perhaps the most radical and, in a carefully structured statements, gives his vision of the role that technology will play in the future. He is a visionary with the ability to realize those visions in equipment and constructions which compel us to accept the images generated by those pieces of equipment as new, non-human (unnatural) realities. The observation of the world takes place completely within the codes of technology and is far removed from the traditional images of reality, images that attempt to maintain the hegemony of the human eye. Like techno-farmers, Woody and Steina attempt in their work to break out of that perception paradigm. The future is definitely digital.
– Willem van Weelden
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Camera Harry Dawson, Editing David Adida, Production Dominique Belloir, Mirage Illimite, Grand Canal Vidéo, Peter Kirby/Media Arts Services
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