VIDEOSKOP: View of the imai video art collection from the outside
Steina & Woody Vasulka: «in search of the castle...» (1981)

In the beginning «in search of the castle...» appears to be a regular home video of an everyday activity in contemporary American life: driving around with no apparent objective. Besides its warped perspective the camera serves a purely documentary function, recording the naturalistic and familiar scenery outside the car. However, as the “search” progresses the work turns into a strange kind of road-movie-drama as the recording is invaded by signal disturbances that multiples, layers, and pixilates the images, in some passages completely beyond recognition. The camera no longer plays the role of an objective device but acts as the generator of a new visuality as it filters the recorded information according to principles of programming unknown to the viewer. Moreover, the sound track seems to follow the disturbances and leaves no audible traces of real sound. The short odyssey enters into an abstract, hybrid environment, where the physical and electronic, lived experience and technology merge to expand and challenge our frames of perception and sense of orientation. However, to expect to find anything specific, let alone to deduce a simple plot, misses the point. What the narrative offers is a personal experience of reflectively navigating and becoming familiar with this transformed reality created by our intimate use of electronic devices. 

View video
Click on the title image or this link to view «in search of the castle...» in the imai online catalog. Choose the button «play» to start the 09:43 min stream. Find further works of Steina & Woody Vasulka viewable in full length in the imai online catalog.

Steina & Woody Vasulka
Biographies and more works of Steina & Woody Vasulka in the imai online catalog >>

Jacob Lillemose
Jacob Lillemose, Ph.D., is a curator and writer based in Berlin and Copenhagen. He curated the transmediale 2012 exhibition entitled «Dark Drives. Uneasy Energies in Technological Times». He is a member of the Danish net art collective Artnode and has edited the anthology «We Love Your Computer. An Anthology on Net Art» published by Artnode and The Royal Art Academy Copenhagen in 2008.
www.transmediale.de | www.artnode.org


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