{"id":4635,"title":"Interview with Steina Vasulka","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-steina-vasulka","version":"f870a9f115e7b52f5f325ff1bade9e363810fa22e7adc83c55c52dcd37198ddf","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9236442+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Chris Hill"}],"authorKeys":["Hill, Chris"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1134","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Steina Vasulka","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Interview with Steina Vasulka.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-steina-vasulka.","publication":"Chris Hill. Interview with Steina Vasulka. Vasulka Archive online. May 1995.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4635.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1134","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":40514},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":621}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Chris Hill: Your descriptions of the situation in New York in the late 60s, early 70s, is especially important and valuable ... Steina Vasulka: People grouped together, formed tribes so to speak, at this time in order to afford the video equipment. They just had to pool equipment; it was a tremendous expense. I have no idea what the portapak cost, but $1000 was worth a lot more that it is now, so it was substantial. Everybody got into this endless thing-that they bought the portapak and they needed the VCR and then they needed to edit. Editing, for the first year or so, was mostly done through razor blades. The other reason for coming together was that the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) could not give money to individuals. They realized that this was a big problem, because it\u0027s the individuals that make the art, not the institutions. Then they set up CAPS (Creative Artists XXX). These were the 60s and the 70s, and the outlook on art was totally different. First of all, there was a celebration of individual creativity and the distaste for institutions. It went together with-well, don\u0027t trust anybody over 30. For you to get money from NYSCA you had to be formal entity, a not-for-profit organization. These production groups and collectives all turned themselves into not-for-profits like People\u0027s Video Theater and Freex and Raindance and Global Village. CH: So probably by 1971, when NYSCA first started funding video projects, they turned themselves into non-for-profit organizations. SV: Actually the first grant that was going to be given to the video tribes was going to come from the Jewish Museum. For some reason, the Jewish Museum, as a not-forprofit, was going to take a grant and financially administer it and were going to allocate it out to the tribes ...[discussion of a wild meeting about receiving funding] ...Elliot Glass [from People\u0027s Video Theater] was here last week and we were trying to remember who spat on whom. Russell Conner was the NYSCA staff person for video. He was hired by this guy Ken Dewey, who was actually the instigator of everything because he decided before anybody that video was art and should be funded by the State Council. But Dewey died. But it was very remarkable. NYSCA was the first council in the nation, 2 or 3 years before NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], to acknowledge video as a medium. It\u0027s interesting that he was so insightful. Then, what Russell did was to run around both New York City and upstate new York and tell people to incorporate because that way they could start receiving money. He came to Ralph Hocking who was already active at that time. Hocking had been in touch with Nam June Paik who was building a colorizer with Shuye Abe. It was the beginning of the Experimental Television Center and other sites. NYSCA also went to Howard Wise and said-incorporate not-for-profit, get out of the Howard Wise Gallery and we will be able to give you money. At that time Wise was very taken by Eric Siegel and his work. Siegel was a protege of Howard Wise, and they asked him who else he wanted to be in his group, and Eric had just met us. We had a kinship. We understood that it was about the tools and the magic and the signal and all those things. He immediately suggested that we could be in the group with him. The big wordsmith in all of this was Frank Gillette. \u0022Raindance\u0022 comes out of R \u0026 D, research and development, a phrase which was used all the time. Nobody says it anymore. Raindance was R \u0026 D for the video movement. He also coined \u0022Radical Software\u0022 and he coined \u0022Electronic Arts Intermix.\u0022 It was Eric who coined the term \u0022Perception,\u0022 which was the name of our group. Sure enough, then the Kitchen became an entity of its own, a sub program of Electronic Arts Intermix. The Perception group regrouped and had Ira [Scneider] and Beryl [Korot] and Juan Downey and Frank Gillette in it with Eric Siegel... This idea of the tribes was totally reinforced by the New York State Council and there was a woman there who suggested to a number of groups that they move upstate to receive NYSCA money. She told the Freex that they would be more likely to get money if they were upstate, instead of in the city. So the Freex said-OK, we\u0027ll go upstate. They got a place in Lanesville, NY. I asked Elliot [Glass] why he got out of video, and he said that when parts of People\u0027s Video Theater decided to go to Woodstock, NY, he had a teaching job in the city and wasn\u0027t willing to go. The State Council had this way of sending people to their destiny, because of the political problem of giving all their money out in New York City. CH: They\u0027ve always been very directive so it\u0027s not surprising. It\u0027s interesting how these institutions become structured. SV: I thought it was very wrong. CH: The Kitchen was started by you and Woody. Were you working with anyone else to start the Kitchen? SV: The third person that started it was Andy Mannik. He had worked a lot with Merce Cunningham as a stage hand, carpenter, this and that. He was passionately interested in dance, so he saw the Kitchen as a performance/dance space. He just found the space, physically. He not only co-founded it with us, he physically found it, and he just dragged us there, and said look at this space, and it was our destiny. CH: Where did the idea of the space come from? I know that Woody talks about it being a place called an LATL, a Live Audience Testing Lab. Was this a thoroughly American model? Was there any European model that you were thinking about? SV: Even if you justify it by saying we wanted a space outside our home because it was getting too crowded and people were there late at night... that wasn\u0027t really the reason. The reason was much more innocent. We saw the space that became the Kitchen and fell in love with it. Andy brought us up to the space and said-how do you like this space? At that time we were dragging monitors from one place to another in those big checker cabs. I wouldn\u0027t do it today. The monitors were big, but we just did it. We were wishing under our breath that we would have a permanent home for the equipment and to be able to showcase our work ... but we were willing to drag along this kind of a difficult New York City life. It was Andy that saw one of our performances and said we ought to have some kind of a video theater. CH: What kinds of performances were you doing at the time? SV: We would set up a lot of monitors, 10-15, in Judson Church in a long row and then let the images drift from one to the other, these kinds of things. We used all audio synthesized music. Because of the time, people just sat there for 3 or 4 hours. They didn\u0027t care; they would sit or lie on the floor. There would be a fair amount of marijuana smoke in the air. Some people would be cross-legged and rolling back and forth. It was casual. It wasn\u0027t like now where you have to come on time and pay money and something starts. CH: So then the Kitchen became another place where you could have the equipment and people could come and share it? SV: Yes. What was interesting was, we were always friendly with all of the tribes but sort of just friendly. We had asked them if they would allow us to show in their places and they had turned us down, like at Raindance and People\u0027s Video Theater, because they felt that they were doing different stuff. They were saving the world and we weren\u0027t really. It was not being turned down cold. It was rather just saying that it wasn\u0027t appropriate, and we wouldn\u0027t push anything. As soon as we had the Kitchen, they all came. They all wanted to show there. Global Village even wanted to have a show there. We had a different audience. CH: What was unique about the Kitchen? SV: It had a very friendly atmosphere; the place itself had very good vibes. What we did usually was to welcome everybody at the door. I always say that I lost interest in the Kitchen when I couldn\u0027t shake hands with everybody in the audience, because that\u0027s what we did. People were a part of it. The other extraordinarily popular part was that there was a bar outside. People could start in the bar and drift into the Kitchen, or better, when the performance was boring and they couldn\u0027t stand it any more, they drifted out and went to the bar. I remember once there was a pretty long, minimal performance and everybody finally went to the bar. The last person had left the Kitchen but they didn\u0027t go home; they went into the bar and they were having a hilarious time. And then the guy who had been showing his work came out with a big smile and everybody applauded him in the bar for giving this excruciating performance. CH: Did you and Woody live there? SV: No. It was a complex. It was a converted hotel lobby with ballrooms. Our place was the Kitchen of the hotel. Most of the complex was converted into theaters. They were all fairly experimental. There were actors\u0027 studios and different kinds of places like that...They all shared the bar in the intermissions...and it was lively. CH: So there were people going into the other theaters for things as well. How did Paik work with the Kitchen? It seems that he was very close to what was going on at the Kitchen at this time. Is that right? SV: He lived down the street. The Kitchen was at 240 Mercer Street and he was at 110 Mercer Street. So in the evening, he would often drift over just to see what was happening. We did print the calendar so it was clear what was going on. I think that he came in his slippers, he came wrapped with his little thing over his belly like he had just walked there. He didn\u0027t have to put on a coat; he didn\u0027t have to put on shoes. He would just drift up the street. He often came in late but he just had a way of brightening up the space. He always come in with this big smile and he would fall asleep and then he would get up at the end of the tape that was showing and he would walk over to the person and say \u0022young man, you are a genius.\u0022 And he hasn\u0027t seen any of the tape, you know!? CH: So it was kind of like a performance? SV: Yes. Then he performed often times, tried out things. Actually, when he had his things, the crowd came: the Madison Avenue type people, and their skins and pelts and pearls and high heels. It was a strangely different kind of crowd. CH: He was already well known. He, himself, would attract a crowd. SV: He was in the art world. He was starting to get a name in the gallery world... CH: Who do you think your audience was at the Kitchen? Video was one day of the week and dance and music had other days. It sounds like people had shared or similar projects and would come to the Kitchen because you or others might be working with similar ideas. So was it a group of mostly artists? SV: Yes. The music program was fairly separate. It was the most successful, and the success came partially because there was a young critic who had just moved into town and had been hired by the Village Voice named Tom Johnson ... He would come there every Monday and write about the event. Within a few months the New York Times hired themselves their first avant-garde music reviewer, John Rockwell. Both of these guys correctly came to the Kitchen as one of the only showcases. We actually felt very lucky that those guys would write every week about what was going on there. Video was rarely written about, never, except Jonas Mekas would write hate articles about video but he did cover it. On Fridays or Saturdays there would be live performances. The people involved with that were typically a guy named Walter Wright who just loved to do live synthesis with actors and have the music drive the video or vice versa. There would be an incredible gathering of instruments and people would bring in another keyboard, another synthesizer, another camera and it would be pooled from several places. CH: What you\u0027re describing has a lot to do with basic generosity too. Do you think that the fact that you weren\u0027t getting a lot of attention in the press had some","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":40514,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}