Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990

Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel, Editors
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
800 pp., illus. 900 b/w. Trade, $59.95
ISBN: 0-262-72050-7.

Reviewed by Dr. Brigitta Zics

brigitta.zics@plymouth.ac.uk

At the beginning of 70s, when the McLuhan fan Gerald O'Grady's visionary idea became realised with initial accesses to special equipments and workshops at the SUNY in Buffalo as one of the first media study programs which later included the Digital Arts Laboratory (1977). The institution promptly became a magnet for practitioners who immediately established an art practice that strongly interconnected theory with creative practice. Mainly using the medium of video and film these working practitioners built an art community in Buffalo that, according to Weibel, produced a method and theory that had the same significance as the Bauhaus or Vkhutemas.

With Buffalo Heads , (running at some 900 illustrations and 800 pages) Peter Weibel and Woody Vasulka have again delivered something of such impact: a book of size and ambition that can stand for itself independently as a holistic volume. This book, which was published after the large scale and remarkable retrospective exhibition ' MindFrames : Media Study at Buffalo' at ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe between December 16, 2006 - March 25, 2007, is intended to fill the gap of historical importance so as to embrace the continuum of that media art practice which has greatly impacted not only on individual's works but also provided institutional models of media art worldwide, and stimulated the rediscovery of practices lost in the uneven diffusion of ideas in the pre-internet age. Buffalo Heads is clearly intended as a sourcebook and archive for future media artists and researchers, and, of course as a record of the exhibition itself.   As Minkowsky (2007) explained, it is an emerging curatorial model of understanding moving image as an architectural quality of information in the age of new technologies.

Buffalo Heads features such as structuralist avant-garde film makers Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits; literature and media theorist Gerald O'Grady; documentary film maker James Blue; video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka; and media artist and currently chairman and CEO of the ZKM Peter Weibel , are pioneers of media art of this particular age when the aesthetic boom of experimental film and especially video production provided stimulating outcomes for emerging art practice. The book dedicates itself not only to display their extensive practice on motion picture and related art practice, which alone could justify the size of the book, but also provides a very detailed documentation of their everyday life at Buffalo and conveys its special atmosphere. Through this documentation we recognize the supremacy of collaborative collective processes in works dealing with art and technology which often, as at Buffalo, are revealed to be important in the production of the very first aesthetic models for one or other medium.

Some of the unique and historically important contributions can be found in this collection in the essays are published here - some for the very first time. The backbone of this contribution is by O'Grady giving a detailed overview of the methodologies and creative strategies at Buffalo and most importantly the artistic claim which underpinned all practices in the community: the shift from object production to 'the mind creating', or as the exhibition put it; 'the framing mind'. Tony Conrad, filmmaker and musician is the last 'Head' who still active at the University and his famous piece The Flicker (1966) displays well Buffalo's ambition to explore the boundaries of human perception and so the mind. In similar manner Paul Sharis's work, which besides Conrad's explored the aesthetics of 'flicker' genre, focused on the spectator's subjective perception. Sharis' proposed exploration of 'cinema as cognition' in which process art becomes a tool for philosophical propositions as for example in his multi-projections installations 3 rd Degree (1973-1990) or Dream Displacement (1975-76). Similarly remarkable practice such as James Blue's Invisible City and its politically charged dialogue anticipates the medium of interactive television and film as an extended mind of the artist giving the final decision as to its conclusion to the spectator. Hollies Frampton, the founder of Digital Arts Laboratory (DAL), has equally contributed to expanded cinema application since his experimental cinema pieces initially developed the IMAGO software that allowed the manipulation film and video animations.

Other pioneering practices also dealt with digital manipulation of the image and followed a visual tradition of aesthetics and how this might impact on human perception. Woody Wasulka's experiments with electronic images, which are transformation ' into a binary code of energy events in time, as they may be derived from light, the molecular communication of sounds, from force field, gravity, or other physical initiation ' (Wasulka, p. 420) resulted in some beautiful studies such as Image to Sound / Sound to Image - Evolution   (1971), Grazing (1976) and The Arithmetic Logic Unit (1978), which as an aesthetic statement followed Wasulka's later works (also illustrated in the book) Landscapes in Fractal (1991) or Displacemens of Daniel Nagrin's Portrait (1995). Steina's visual arts clearly show familiarity to Wasulka's exploration of binary image particularly in her recent piece Trevor (2000), which displays a sonically distorted face, or the much earlier work Lilith (1987). And even earlier her remarkable piece Allvision (1976) also once again enquires human cognition and confronts its qualities with camera lenses which space perceived optically and mechanically, and through the human factory.

Peter Weibel's account is similarly rich in a broad spectrum of media art works which include well-known socio-politically charged actions and investigations from collective consciousness as with Valie Export Tap and Touch Cinema (1966) or From the Portfolio of Dogness (1968), to the 'extended film' applications as the auto-generative sound screen The Magic Eye (1969) or other technology mediated works that were exploring a meta-concept of cognition within the notion of self-awareness of the observer   through the visual feedback loops ( as for example in The Endless Sandwich (1969) Observing Observation: Uncertainty (1973) or Infinite Intuition (1982)). Anticipating the later great discourse of man-machine interaction in media art Weibel's activity exemplifies the strong intertwining of theory and practice evident at Buffalo and foreshadows cross-media applications in experimental and critical practice of technology and society with a great sensitivity for sciences and aesthetics.

What this book tells contemporary practitioners and theorist is that the aesthetic capacities of the emerging technology today has already been investigated by avant-garde filmmakers especially in how 'mind' might frame artistic experience through technology. Understanding these discourses we arrive at the familiar dialogue of cognition and creativity that at the moment determine our understanding of contemporary expanded cinema application and/or interactive media art. As such 'Buffalo Heads' provide multidimensional model; it is an education model for art, and a curatorial model for motion image and its art forms as well as an aesthetic model of 'mind creating'. After this remarkable volume, we might hope for a similar book on the emerging 'Heads' of new media which instead an historicisation of events could provide an up-to-dated 'map' of inspiring works which are not only more likely to impact on current practices but also to disappear without an institutionalisation. Buffalo Heads obliges us once again to ask what is the natural selective process for important art that has been lost?