Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990 (review)

At the beginning of the 1970s Gerald O'Grady, a McLuhan fan and visionary, initially realized his ideas through his access to special equipment and workshops at State University of New York, Buffalo. This was the location of one of the first media study programs, which later included the Digital Arts Laboratory (1977). The institution promptly became a magnet for practitioners who immediately established an art practice that strongly interconnected theory with creative practice. Mainly using the media of video and film, these working practitioners built an art community in Buffalo that, according to Weibel, produced a method and theory that had the same significance as the Bauhaus or Vkhutemas.

With Buffalo Heads (running at some 900 illustrations and 800 pages), Peter Weibel and Woody Vasulka have again delivered something of great impact: a book of size and ambition that can stand for itself independently as a holistic volume. This book, which was published after the large-scale and remarkable retrospective exhibition MindFrames: Media Study at Buffalo, at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (16 December 2006-25 March 2007), is intended to fill a historical gap. It embraces the continuum of media art practice that has greatly impacted individual works, provided institutional models of media art worldwide and stimulated the rediscovery of practices lost in the uneven diffusion of ideas in the pre-Internet age. Buffalo Heads is clearly intended as a source-book and archive for future media artists and researchers and, of course, as a record of the exhibition itself. As Minkowsky has explained (p. 19), it is an emerging curatorial model of understanding the moving image as an architectural quality of information in the age of new technologies.

Buffalo Heads features structuralist avant-garde filmmakers such as Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits; literature and media theorist Gerald O'Grady; documentary filmmaker James Blue; video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka; and media artist Peter Weibel, who is currently chairman and CEO of the ZKM. All are pioneers of the media art of this particular age, when the aesthetic boom of experimental film and especially video production provided stimulating outcomes for emerging art practice. The book not only dedicates itself to displaying their extensive practices in motion picture and related art projects, which alone could justify the size of the book, but also provides a very detailed documentation of their everyday life at Buffalo and conveys its special atmosphere. This documentation allows us to recognize the supremacy of collaborative collective processes in works dealing with art and technology. Often, as at Buffalo, the importance of collaborative, collective processes is revealed in the production of the very first aesthetic models for one medium or another.

Unique and historically important contributions can be found in this collection of essays. Some are published here for the very first time. The backbone of these contributions is O'Grady's detailed overview of the methodologies and creative strategies at Buffalo and, most importantly, the artistic brief that underpinned all practices in the community: the shift from object production to "the mind creating" or, as the exhibition put it, "the framing mind." Tony Conrad, filmmaker and musician, is the last "Head" still active at the university, and his famous piece The Flicker (1966) well displays Buffalo's ambition to explore the boundaries of human perception and probe the mind. In a similar manner Paul Sharits's work, which like Conrad's explored the aesthetics of the "flicker" genre, is focused on the spectator's subjective perception. Sharits proposed exploration of "cinema as cognition," in which process art becomes a tool for philosophical propositions, as for example in his multi-projection installations 3rd Degree (1973--1990) or Dream Displacement (1975--1976). Similarly, remarkable projects such as James Blue's Invisible City, with its politically charged dialogue, anticipates the medium of interactive television and film as an "extended mind" of the...