Vašulka Kitchen Brno

The Center for New Media Art – Vašulka Kitchen Brno (VKB) is a place for research, artistic experiments and informal education in the field of new media art. It consists of the study archive of Woody and Steina Vašulka, an exhibition of their selected works and a study room, all of which are open to the public, experts and artists. There is a regular programme for the public, including lectures, concerts, exhibitions, presentations, workshops, screenings and seminars. The Centre is located on the upper floor of the House of the Lords of Kunštát and is open from 10am to 6pm from Tuesday to Sunday when there is an exhibition and from Tuesday to Friday when there is no exhibition.

Woody Vašulka was born on 20 January 1937 in Brno-Slatina as Bohuslav Petr Vašulka. He spent his childhood and youth in Brno and this stage of his life became decisive for his artistic progress. As a student of the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, he met his future wife Steina in Prague, where she studied violin. From 1965, they lived together abroad, mainly in the USA, where they belonged to the first generation of artists experimenting with video technologies. They produced structural and documentary videos and invented tools for working with electronic images and sound. Through their artistic creation, they explored analogue and digital processes generating electronic images, sounds and spaces. In their understanding, new technologies were primarily a means for a new type of creativity, knowledge and communication, which they themselves described as a dialogue with tools. In the 1990s, Vašulka renewed his professional contacts with Brno. He helped establish the first multimedia art laboratory in the Czech Republic at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology (FaVU VUT) and he subsequently headed it for some time. He regularly returned to Brno until the end of his life. In 2015, he was awarded the Brno City Award for his lifelong work.

Vašulka Kitchen Brno continues to map and reflect on the Vašulkas’ work in a broad cultural and international context; it is making a catalogue of their materials, organizing the media library with the Vašulkas’ work into a new digital database, and building a library focusing on the beginnings of video art and current theory of new media art. It is building an archive of contemporary experimental audio-visual work, based on the VKB programme and collaboration with international artists in the field of new/digital media. It provides facilities for Czech and foreign researchers, students, teachers and curators and initiates research projects and conferences. Once a year, it offers a one-month artistic residency in cooperation with the Brno House of Arts.