The Kitchen: An Image and Sound Laboratory: A Rap with Woody and Steina Vasulka, Shridhar Bapat and Dimitri Devyatkin
This radio program was produced by Jud Yalkut and broadcast on WBAI-FM, New York, as part of a series of one-hour panel discussions on contemporary art, which were presented in the station's Artists and Critics series. Yalkut hosted several of them, including two shows on 16mm film in New York City, and two discussions on video. The first panel discussion on video, Talking Heads in Videospace, featured artists Nam June Paik, Shirley Clarke, Bill Etra and Walter Wright. The second program was about The Kitchen. The participants included the organization's founders and early programmers, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Shridhar Bhapat, and Dimitri Devyatkin. In this conversation, they discuss topics ranging from The Kitchen's genesis; its early focus on video artists working in electronic experimentation, rather than conceptualism; its context as a theater; its evolution from a grass-roots space to a more professional organization; and programs such as the Computer Art Festival. They also discuss the philosophical and aesthetic implications of video as a medium; its relation to literature and modern art; the growing vocabulary of technological tools, and video's communal and humanistic applications.