Bufallo Heads

Woody’s shift from film to video; Hallucinogens, “transformations of perception”

“Carlut: How did you get into video? Woody: I understood it was unlike film. I had just graduated from the famous Film Academy of Prague, where the artistic agenda was very clear: to perfect the language of the indirect, the ever-changing code of metaphorical encryption. It produced many successes such as the New Czech Wave of the 1960s. Legitimate film in the USA was an industry. I had neither the temperament for, not the interest in, industrial filmmaking. Of course, there was something else and it took me no time to find it—the American film avant-garde. I was very skeptical at first. We Europeans had had the real film avant-garde, but it was long over. At a second glance, the Americans were magnificent. It set me straight. I thought that it was not possible to break the literary bonds with moving images and set filmic syntax free again, but it was too late. I had already abandoned film. I was now in the world of electronics, first through sound making, then video. It went very fast. We got some funding and our own theater. We did exactly what we wanted, and never had to deal with the world of the galleries. We made our own art world...

There was another great issue here: hallucinogens, and what resulted in the establishment of the ‘new aesthetic norm.’ Before theses experiences I had only art to refer to, but suddenly there was something that actually performed profound transformations of perception, something that art could only suggest, interactively, aurally, visually, and tangibly! Sound could influence image and image could influence movement...This was all a magnificent cultural opportunity.”

— “A Conversation between Steina and Woody Vasulka, Don Foresta and Christiane Carlut,” (1992) in Buffalo Heads, Woody Vasulka & Peter Weibel, eds, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008)