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Media Study faculty shine
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
"The significance of the Department of Media Study at Buffalo for the media age is comparable to the influence of other historical institutions of art history, such as Black Mountain College in North Carolina or the Bauhaus."
CONRAD
Those words introduce a major exhibition at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, which has a worldwide reputation as a cultural institution.
The exhibition, titled "Mind Frame: Media Study at Buffalo, 1973-90," opened Dec. 16 and will run through March 18.
The show celebrates the work of eight pioneering media artists, members of the UB faculty (many at the same time) who queried the relationship between media and constructions of reality. They produced works of profound expressiveness while making groundbreaking contributions to the founding of film and media studies in the United States.
The exhibit features the work of Gerald O'Grady, who founded and directed the UB Department of Media Study (1972-90); the late Hollis Frampton, associate professor for film and film history (1973-84); the late Paul Sharits, associate professor for film history/analysis (1973-92); and Woody Vasulka (1973-79), associate professor for video.
Also included in the exhibit are Steina Vasulka, adjunct professor for video (1977-79); the late James Blue (1977-80), associate professor for documentary film; Tony Conrad (1976-present), associate professor for video production/analysis; and Peter Weibel (1984-89), associate professor for video/digital arts.
More information about them and their individual work can be found online at the exhibition Web site at http://hosting.zkm.de/mindframes_e/stories/storyReader$23.
Notable is the variety of media in which most of these people worked—experimental film and video production, digital art, theoretical writing, music composition and performance, conceptual art, electronic poetry, computer software and hardware development—and the fact that all of them made innovative and widely recognized contributions to whatever fields they touched.
In the media arts, they were among the first to investigate the materiality of film, its visual structure and time-bound composition, and the relationship between image and language. They queried the use of the computer as a creative tool, pioneered the structural film movement (in which the shape of the film was crucial and the content peripheral), and set the tone for the socially conscious documentary films of the 1960s and beyond.
Several of them helped to establish the field of computer-assisted video and defined a formal vocabulary specific to electronic images. Others produced filmatic, aural, digital and videographic masterpieces, including operas and music recordings.
In addition, these artists and teachers all were noted for their deep commitment to the democratization of communication at all levels and in all forms long before this was an issue with the general public or with the communication industry. They have won significant international awards and for decades their work has been exhibited in major art venues here and abroad.
The ZKM, which is headed by Weibel, holds a unique position in the world of art. It responds to rapid developments in information technology and changing social structures, and its work combines production and research, exhibitions and events, coordination and documentation.