Woody Vasulka — Matrix and the founding of Electronic Arts Intermix

1970

Artists: Woody Vasulka, Steina Vasulka · Year: 1970 · Medium: Video installation and distribution infrastructure — multi-monitor sculptural arrays · Substrate: Sony Portapak video equipment; custom video synthesizer modifications; installation structures of varying monitor counts · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Electronic Arts Intermix (co-founded 1971); The Kitchen (co-founded 1971) Woody and Steina Vasulka began working with video in New York in 1969, and across 1970–71 produced a body of multi-monitor work — Matrix, Home, Participation — that treated video as a scalable sculptural medium. The monitors themselves are the artwork; the video content is less important than the physical arrangement of screens. This approach — video-as-sculpture rather than video-as-content — was ahead of its time and directly influenced the subsequent video-installation tradition. More institutionally important: the Vasulkas co-founded Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in 1971 and The Kitchen (originally at the Mercer Arts Center) in the same year. EAI became the primary distribution infrastructure for early video art — artists could license their tapes for museum exhibition through EAI, which maintained master copies and handled legal and technical logistics that individual artists could not. Many works covered elsewhere in this archive (Paik's tapes, Schwartz's films' video versions, VanDerBeek material, dozens of others) survive because EAI preserved them. The Kitchen, still operating, became one of the most influential experimental-performance venues in New York. The Vasulkas continued to produce video and computer-based work for the rest of their lives. They moved from New York to Santa Fe in 1980 and continued working there through Woody's death in 2019. Steina continues to work. Lore Woody was Czech (born Jozef Vašulka in Brno, 1937); Steina is Icelandic (born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir, 1940). They met in Prague in the early 1960s and emigrated to New York in 1965. Their Santa Fe archive — decades of video equipment, tapes, and documentation — is now held by the Vasulka Archive Chronicle and by the University of California Santa Barbara. EAI's continued operation is the Vasulkas' most durable institutional legacy. Sources • Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org) — catalog and history • Vasulka Archive Chronicle (vasulka.org) • Spielmann, Yvonne — Video: The Reflexive Medium (MIT Press, 2008)