The Planet of Expanded Visions

Vasulka Live Archive / Augmented Interfaces

The exhibition took the form of an ecosystem of interfaces that make the content of the Steina and Woody Vasulka archive accessible in an innovative way. The title Planet of Augmented Visions refers to one of the leitmotifs of the creative practice of these pioneers of electronic arts — the development of technical extensions of the human perceptual apparatus. To do so, they used different optical devices (consisting of mirror spheres or mobile cameras), with the aim of overcoming the limitations of the human “point of view” and replacing them with “expanded visions”, and “allvisions” of human-machine arrangements.

The exhibits are the results of an attempt to design novel ways of accessing and mediating the Vasulkas’ archive content. They are epistemological tools made within an interdisciplinary research project devoted to the experimental application of machine learning in the service of video art historiography, analysis, and mediation. To this end, unique intelligent software for iconographic and audiographic analysis of the Vasulkas’ videos were programmed and trained. As they display in real-time the visual and audio leitmotifs appearing in the videos of the Vasulkas, they serve as a means of performative mediation upon the poetics of the Vasulkas’ work. Thus, we declare the exhibition space to be a laboratory dedicated to an emerging discipline — the expanded iconology of the age of artificial intelligence (Emilly L. Spratt, 2017). Jana Horáková, curator

Vasulka Live Archive: The intelligent epistemological tool

Jana Horáková (CZ), Jiří Schimmel (CZ), Štěpán Miklánek (CZ), Pavel Sikora (CZ), Dušan Barok (SK/NO)

The Vasulka Live Archive website is an intelligent interface to the content of the Steina and Woody Vasulka archive. It consists of two interfaces called Machine Vision and Machine Learning. While playing a selected work, users can see a graphical representation of the occurrence of the audio and video objects identified by the artificial neural networks on the timeline with an accuracy of one second.

Vasulka Live Archive: The Immersive Virtual Reality

Chamit Abdulvaliyev (KZ/CZ), Pavel Sikora (CZ)

This is an Android app that has been programmed in the Unity game engine. It uses stored information from the outputs of neural network models developed in the Vasulka Live Archive project and places previews of Vasulkas’ videos in a virtual 3D space. Virtual reality visitors can move around the space, trigger, and rearrange the videos.

Vasulka Live Archive: Machine Dreaming

Pavel Sikora (CZ), Štěpán Miklánek (CZ), Lucid library

The video loop presents the outputs of the pseudo-cognitive processes that take place in the lower layers of the artificial neural network model during the analyses of the content of the Vasulkas’ video archive. These visualizations were created as a by-product of the process of production of the neural network classification model.

Vasulka Live Archive: Videomapping

Jana Horáková (CZ), Jiří Mucha (CZ), Tomáš Carda (CZ), Pavel Sikora (CZ), Štěpán Miklánek (CZ), Roman Ševčík (CZ)

The large-format projection on the facade of the Brno House of Arts took place on December 20th, 2021, on the second anniversary of Woody Vasulka’s passing. The projected audiovisual remix was created from fragments of videos by Steina and Woody Vasulka, which were interwoven with visualizations of the pseudo-cognitive processes of artificial neural networks.

Biographies

Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts — Theory of Interactive Media study program Expertise: New media art history, theory, and aesthetics. Curation of new media art exhibitions using new technologies and media.

Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication — Department of Telecommunications. Expertise: Machine learning, databases, interactive interfaces.

Credits

Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts (CZ); Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication (CZ);
Application guarantors: Center for New Media Art — Vašulka Kitchen Brno (CZ), The Brno House of Arts (CZ).
The exhibition concept: Jana Horáková
Curated by: Jana Horáková, Jiří Mucha Production: Jennifer Helia DeFelice Assistance: Zuzana Vyšňová
The Vasulka Live Archive project was implemented with the financial participation of the Technical Agency of the Czech Republic under the ÉTA program. It results from the project Media Art Live Archive: Intelligent Interface for Interactive Mediation of Cultural Heritage (No. TL02000270).
vasulkalivearchive.net