Video Art and Forming Memories

In Woody Vasulkas' of Art of Memory, the artist integrated the documentary film and photography into flows of digital manipulated images. Black-and-white newsreel footages of cavalry and flaming buildings were processed into moving, multi-screen polyhedrons; the sky behind the figure suddenly crawls with geometric "rain". Then comes the voice of an important historical feature, on seeing the first explosion of the atomic bomb. Vasulka transformed the historical imagery and audio into new visual displays.

First of all, the obvious theme for this video is a critique on the use of historical recording imagery technology, photography and film. By transforming the footages and images of wars into fluid digital movement and ambiguous shapes, the artist concerned about the military-industrial use of such technology. He was questioning on the present and the preservative aspects of history and our memory about that. His point was to deconstruct the relationship between our memories about the history with those “historical” black and white events footages. By transferring the filmic records into other media and translated them into the state of an electronic pictoriality, he challenged the priority in human notions and entered into the private space of historical documents.

Secondly, the major theme for Vasulka’s work is to investigate the historical distance of the media used and point to the storage function of historical documentary imagery and sound. By transforming old records of images and sound into energetic and fluid electronic movements, he freed or activated those dead visual/audiovisual materials, and then translated them back from being a container of human memory into remembered history. He changed the critical distance in the display of imagery as memory. By making the war footages into waveforms surfaces in the new electronic pictoriality, Vasulka used his computer- generated forms proved how memory distorted the shape of events, and how permeable was the media imagery as a container of supposed truth influenced our understandings. By this, he demonstrated the self-reflexivity of video technology as a new medium. And then brought new notions to the aesthetic content in understanding the distance between the two levels of display, resulting in exploring the construction of our memory based on a picture world and the way to view our imagery cultural.