MindFrames.
Media Study at Buffalo 1973 1990
December 16, 2006 through March 18, 2007
Participating Artists:
Gerald OGrady, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, James Blue, Tony Conrad, Steina, Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel
ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Lorenzstr. 19
76135 Karlsruhe, Germany
phone: 49(0)721/8100-1200
info [at] zkm.de
www.zkm.de
The exhibition MindFrames celebrates a unique context, specifically a geographic and time-bound situation within which a mixture of brilliant avant-garde film makers and video artists, under the leadership of a media visionary, found themselves together in one place, where for the first time a department of media art was created within a university setting.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo grew to become one of the most important media centers in the world. Under the direction of Gerald OGrady, the teaching staff included the structuralist avant-garde film makers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits; the documentary film maker James Blue; and the legendary video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, as well as Peter Weibel.
MindFrames will offer the first comprehensive insight into this groundbreaking art of the 1970s and 1980s, which was so decisive for media arts further development and whose style remains influential today. The entire horizon of aesthetic issues and solutions that came along with the introduction of the technical image into art becomes available based on the example of the represented artists and their individual positions. The teachings, ideas, and concepts of that time are made accessible via the studio laboratory conceived just for this exhibition, which makes it possible to study and experience the time-based art of the moving image in a novel fashion. Access is provided in the form of a digital archive, making it possible for artists to study numerous artistic productions, theoretical texts, letters, photographs, documents, etc.
The title MindFrames indicates that this was a time and a place for re-positioning and expanding the frame of reference for Media Art and pushing ahead the transformation from Film Art to discourse of the (visual) code. The exhibition teaches us to understand the art of media, and through that, media themselves.
Curated by Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel with Thomas Thiel.
The results of the exhibition will be presented in an extensive scholarly publication that will be published by The MIT Press in 2007 in English. Numerous illustrations, source texts by the artists, previously unpublished interviews, essays, and other historical documents outline a comprehensive panorama of the pioneers of Media Art at the Department of Media Study, the State University of New York, Buffalo.
Editors: Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel.
Opening hours:
Wed-Fri 10 am – 6 pm
Sat, Sun 11 am – 6 pm
Thur 11.01. / 08.02. / 08.03.: 10 am – 9 pm
Mon, Tue closed
Guided tours:
Sat 2 pm, Sun 4 pm
More information:
www.zkm.de/mindframes
Press contact
Irina Koutoudis
phone: 49(0)721/8100-1220
fax: 49(0)721/8100-1139
e-mail: presse@zkm.de
