Heraldic View
1.2.3.4.
Soundsize

This project is purely experimental and educational. Its aim is not to create an artwork, but to produce new objects through video technology, whose language must ceaselessly be invented or discovered. Starting in the 1970s, Steina and Woody Vasulka tried to develop a personal 'vocabulary' of audio-visual forms based on a specifically electronic treatment.

The claim to specificity of the video medium was based on the possibility of displaying its irreducible technical characteristics. The wave-based nature of the electronic image is thus the basic datum from which the Vasulkas affirm the electronic unity of image and sound in the video. They show or demonstrate this unity, here by collateral sonic and visual variations. The image and sound synthesisers are aligned, linked by the same waves. Another technical characteristic, affirmed as specific to video, is the possibility of working, producing, and perceiving image and sound live, immediately. Creativity in real time is video's advantage over film, which always involves a temporal dissociation between filming and viewing; the separation or delay is the time necessary to develop film in a laboratory, a step which is not required for video. Real time modifies the relationship of artisan and craft; this work bears witness to it.

The wave-based nature of the electronic image differentiates it from film in that it can have a variation of effects without external editing; the image varies within itself.

These educational objects gain their full value in retrospect, when one juxtaposes them to the Vasulkas' later major works, where this vocabulary is used for superior aims directly concerned with the realm of art.

Hyppolite Massardier
(Texte extrait du catalogue 'Vidéo et après', éd. Centre Pompidou/ éditions Carré, 1992)
Translated by Phoebe Green