Revisioning
ReVISIONing THE BOHEMIAN INSTITUT
Miloš Vojtěchovský
Within the theoretical methods of the Cultural Transfer Theory1 this paper addresses the conceptual framework of Steina and Woody work during the 90s, reflecting the context of geopolitical and cultural situation and shift between the USA and the former Czechoslovakia. Shortly after 1989 Woody Vasulka was one of many expats who were reintroduced, their oeuvre interpreted, sometimes re-integrated, or translated into the local cultural or visual art customs, vocabularies and grids. One of most celebrated is the founder of Transpersonal Psychology Stanislav Grof. Woody and Steina Vasulka were also endorsed by different subjects and often presented as an example of a successful story, as a social pattern of an emigre who fulfilled his American dream, became one of visionary thinkers of hi-tech determined attempt how art could serve as as vehicle to shift a “backward” society, to enforce / trigger emancipatory processes of post-totalitarian society, and embrace the democratic, liberal and open one. Though in fact Vasulkas did not manage to realize it, in this case I am referring to the forgotten idea to establish in Prague something which was called the Bohemian Institute. The initial idea was most likely articulated by Woody, but it could be better to claim that it emerged from a conceptually and utopicaly colored “bohemian” american counter-culture community Vasulkas became part of in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What sort of “a cultural transfer” was their hope to reconnect West-coast techno spirituality2 with a mythical Bohemia, considered here as “an ancient cradle of alchemy, magic and hermeticism”?
The Brotherhood
S]he [the cook] couldn’t prepare the food, a thick soup was cooking in two gigantic pots, and however often the woman tested it with ladles and poured it down from high up, she couldn’t get it right, it must be the fault of the inadequate fire, and so she sat down in front of the door, and raked about in the glowing coals with the poker. The smoke which filled the kitchen gave her a cough which at times was so violent that she would reach for a chair and for several minutes do nothing but cough. Franz Kafka (Amerika or The Man who Disappeared)
One of the formative concepts and idiosyncratic strategy of Vasulka's attitude towards the act of creation was their mutual complement and their need and talent for social cohesion, their ability to form, initiate and care for an environment tribute to non-institutional open transdisciplinary collectives or collaborations, as in the case of The Electronic Kitchen in New York, Media lab in Buffalo, or Art and Science Laboratory in Santa Fe. Since their transfer from East Coast to New Mexico in 1980 they succeeded in a short time to map, affiliate and approach many similarly oriented artists, technicians, geeks and scientists not only in Santa Fe, but across the West Coast. They invited them to join and fuse in various media art and “art and science” platforms and projects.
Probably the most famous was Techne & Eros: Art and Science Laboratory they founded in January 2000 together with composer David D. Dunn and mathematician and physicist James P. Crutchfield 3. It was parallel with the construction of The Brotherhood - the last assemblage made by Woody and his comrades. It can be considered as an outcome and embodiment of a collective creative act where Woody Vasulka shared his skills with others. The Brotherhood is a bridge between the past and future – connecting history of science, art and magic. It can be interpreted as a contemporary resurrection of ancient ideas of alchemical Opus Magnus – as a convergence of Logos and Mythos, Matter and Energy, East and West, Linear and Non-epistemic Space, a never-ending dialogue between Homo Faber and Techné, intermingling of mind and machine, life and death, nightmare and utopia.
First concept of The Bohemian Institute was mentioned in the letter sent in June 1990 to Gottfried Hattinger, who was the curator of the planned project of the media archeology exhibition Der Eigenwelt der Apparate for Ars Electronica festival in 1992. Woody Vasulka, David Dunn, Liz Rymland and Terence McKenna attended already before the Ars Electronica symposium in 19904 Dunn and Vasulka presented then their collaborative multimedia environment project entitled The Theatre of Hybrid Automata, including Woody’s Pan/Tilt/Rotate camera and libretto by Liz Rymland5 Terence McKenna held a lecture about New Maps of Hyperspace, where he was connecting electornic technology, ecology and psychedelia.6 The new Institute in Prague was supposed to play a role of “a cross cultural nexus whose time has come…designed as a think tank/gallery/cafe that will stake out the rutting edge in eco-global and psychedelic ideas and technology. Day to day management would reside with a rotating International staff operating out of a beautiful Baroque building in central Prague or possibly Marienbad.... The ultimate notion is to join and contribute to the Prague Renaissance and also to establish a locus for an expatriate critique of American society. By creating a community based on art and ideas are true to the original alchemical spirit of old Bohemia we will make a significant contribution to the impulse toward an Archaic Revival now being felt worldwide. By this process we will make a positive contribution to the changes going on in Eastern Europe and we will be able to participate unhindered In a critique of the high technology, industrial democracies that we will have left behind. A critique that, as we approach the Third Millennium, is sure to grow in Intensity....".
The first project of the institute planned to be a documentary film “to be shot in Prague during the International Transpersonal Association conference to be held there in mid-June of this year…”. In the letter is as well mentioned an abstract for a lecture during AE symposium: “.. Steina and Woody Vasulka, composer David Dunn and ethnobotanist and philosopher Terence McKenna will present a lecture in conjunction with a variety of media installations to be exhibited at Ars Electronica.The presentation will focus upon the interconnections between computer graphics and sound, videoart, the new sciences of complexity, ethno-pharmacology, and artificial reality research. It will specifically articulate new insights into the evolutionary basis for the creation of virtual reality technologies and the imperative for artists to participate in their development. Through illustrating the profound connection of current media and computer experimentation to the ancient lineage of shamanic and ethno-pharmacological knowledge,the group will attempt to discuss their aesthetic research as part of a larger cultural search for a latter-20th century logos.Integral to this discussion will be a variety of metaphors borrowed from natural and cultural history which not only imply new theories of time and perception but explore the potential for a symbiosis between the somatic and technological aspects of human identity within "digital space" as a new human perceptual environment.” Woody announced a new production team including David Dunn, Liz Rymland and Terence McKenna and estimated the costs for the start-up of the Institute in Prague about 30 000 USD.
The reaction of Gottfried Hattinger at least in the digitized files of the online Vašulka archive is absent. But the requested support to contribute to funding the new center in Prague did not probably arrive nor from AE nor from elsewhere. Nevertheless the proposition for the exhibition Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt –– Private World of the World of Equipments in 1992 became for Woody (and Steina) their entrance into the global art scene and helped to expand their vivid and rhizomatic artistic communication network to East Europe, even to Japan. Since this exhibition their international reputation and prestige had grown and Woody used the chance to get funded travel to Linz for visiting Brno (and Prague) to meet with friends and discuss new opportunities to reconnect or collaborate with local institutions....Alas… no trace or record about the dreamhouse of the Bohemian institute.7
The proposal that members of the team of Bohemian institute will document the International Transpersonal Association Conference held in Prague in June 1992 failed but the original idea was picked up by a different team, led by the producer Steven Marshank. Terence McKenna became the main actor and guide of the Prague Gnosis film, interviewing some of the speakers for the conference as Ram Dass, Angeles Arrien, Kenneth Ring, Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Purce, David White, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, or a friend of Vašulkas from Santa Fe and Santa Fe Institute, Ralph Abraham.8 The guru and spiritual head of the Prague Conference was another Czech expat: psychiatrist Stanislav Grof (born 1931) who left Czechoslovakia in 1967 to the USA. In his research Stan Grof focused mainly of non ordinary states of consciousness and on holistic approach to the mind, body and the universe. He became a scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and It was there where he codeveloped, with his wife Christina a technique that includes deep, connected breathing, music, art, and trained facilitation with the goal of wholeness, healing, and wisdom called Holotropic Breathwork. 5
Grofs wanted originally to organize the Twelfth Transpersonal conference in Russia but after production problems, decided to move it to Prague: “The choice of Prague as the venue was symbolic, representing the transformation occurring in Eastern Europe following the fall of communism. The city, described as "poised at the center of European crisis and promise", offered a metaphor for the global changes and shifts in human psychology that the conference aimed to address. The theme was Science, Spirituality, and the Global Crisis: Toward a World with a Future. The location was the Smetana hall in Obecní dům in the center of Prague with a capacity of 1600 seats. It was sold out and the registration had to be stopped a month before, and many of interested visitors could not be admitted due to space limitations. The participants came from 36 different countries. The large pre-conference Holotropic Breathwork workshop attended 150 participants. “The conference ended with the performance of Babatunde Otatunji with ten African drummers and dancers walking through the central lane from the Concert Hall and danced through the streets to the Old Town Square, joined by conference participants. The drumming and Dionysian dancing continued there until wee hours.” 9
Among the invited lecturers beside were Stanislav Grof, for example Ralph Metzner, Ram Dass, Rupert Sheldrake, Charles T. Tart, David Bohm, Ivan Havel, or Karl Pribram. It seems like a historical paradox that Woody and Steina did not get invitation to attend, or rather could not visit. Probably they were busy with the preparation for the Eigenwelt der Apparatus exhibition and finishing the catalogue for Linz starting in September.
A mycelial microelectric signal between the virtual Bohemia Institute, and Art and Science lab, Esalen Institute and Santa Fe institute are obvious to refer to the famous theory of morphogenetical resonance by the scientist Rupert Sheldrake. The ideas and concepts beyond the work of Woody and Steina during the 90s, their scrutiny for a new landscape of poetics of machines, leading towards “non ordinary states of consciousness” which Stanislav Grof was talking about, or to the “non–linear space” as a “hetero-utopia” of disembodied mind, Woody dreamed about.
“In other words, the user/perceiver's experience of the event could consist of a constant transformation of normal temporal perception and a constant interactive modulation between sensory modes themselves. Text would transform into speech into image into environmental sound in a highly fluid, co-synchronous and synaesthetic fashion without regard to a linear experience of time.” (Woody Vasulka, The New Epistemic Space) “The position of art, while remaining reluctant to embrace such an anti-technological stance in spite of the latest generational effort towards a broad integration with mass culture, has also been in opposition to successful models of social engineering which manifest as uniformist, doctrinaire and oppressive to individual diversity. Today we still hear the dissenting voice of the legitimate art community, made powerless by the social structuring of the machine/state.”
(Woody Vasulka / David Dunn: Digital Space: A Research Proposal,1990)
Seemingly the 12th Transpersonal psychology conference did not leave a deep mark in the Czech culture. Many Czech artist and intelectuals didnt speak foreign languages and could not pay the conference fee. Among the local speakers were a.o. psychiatrist Cyril Höschl or philosophers Jiří Fiala, Radim Palouš, Ivan Havel and Zdeněk Neubauer. Woody's classmate and friend Jiří Stivín performed with his flute. Zdeněk Neubauer lecture was about Tao of Biology10 where he refered to the content of Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics11 and applied it to biology. Neubauer argues in this paper that “We should realize in this context that the mechanical space of classical physics is rather a parody of real space, because it literally suffers from a lack of space! This is true in two meaning: First: the determinism of the mechanistic concept does not provide room for choice, and the second: whatever happens in this space takes up space and must compete for it until it is itself mechanically displaced by something else (dis-placed)...The new metaparadigm is a challenge for science towards pluralism, for searching for an ever-new epistemological space, requiring specific theories or methods of mapping. We could call the discovery of such a space and the elaboration of its geometry understanding. Understanding differs from mere interpretation, which is the goal of traditional science, convinced that its interpretation exhausts being. ... Understanding or opening up the relevant epistemological space at the same time opens up for our knowledge the path to real knowledge, which does not stop at projections, but with their help penetrates directly into the world in which the beings studied are at home, into the places of their own residence.12
The ideas beyond the poetics and aesthetics of space and liberated frame and signal which formed the works of Woody and Steina during the years in Santa Fe could and did resonate with the fermentation of a new, alternative theory of society and universe catalyzed by the encounters in early 90s Bohemia. It didnt last long and the Bohemian Institute turned out to be just a dream.
