This talk will introduce my Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape, a project created for the 2023 VKA exhibition, together with an addendum that draws from a 2024 interview with Arnold Dreyblatt, an American composer, media artist, and early student (1973-74) of the Vašulkas, now living in Berlin. Arnold and Woody traveled together through Eastern Europe in the mid-1980s when each were shaping their respective inquiries into memory and archives. Reflecting on the interview with Dreyblatt and briefly foregrounding three Vašulka projects—Participation (Vašulkas, 1969); Violin Power (Steina, 1973-present); and Art of Memory (Woody, 1986)—this talk will consider the Vašulkas’ production of an archive as the performance of yet another time-based tool that not only enables us to focus an art practice at a moment in cultural time but also, inspired by a 1995 observation by Steina, to permit artists and their audiences to find each other in dialogues that sometimes occur across decades.
https://vkba.vasulkakitchen.org/vv-mediascape
Chris Hill is a media curator and currently on the faculty at CalArts. She received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo, and was video programmer at Hallwalls (Buffalo) for over a decade. Hill curated Surveying the First Decade: Video Art & Alternative Media (1996), a 17 hour collection distributed by the Video Data Bank, and edited the resource guide Rewind. Hill taught in the Video/ Performance Studio at the Technical University in Brno in the mid-1990s and her website Walking Trips in Czech Lands (1997) features interviews with artists active in the Czech parallel culture before 1989. Her research interests include re-performing archives and beekeeping practice. Her recent project for the Vašulka Kitchen Brno is A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vašulka Mediascape (2023).