Participating artists:

Gerald O Grady
Hollis Frampton
Paul Sharits
James Blue
Tony Conrad
Steina
Woody Vasulka
Peter Weibel

Curated by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Peter Weibel with Thomas Thiel.

16 December 06�18 March 2007 MindFrames. Media Study at Buffalo 1973�1990 ZKM | Media Museum, Atria 8+9 Opening Fri, 15 December 7 p.m. in the ZKM_Foyer

"Academy" and "Art" are highly actual themes. The founding of academies and universities is a hot topic. Twentieth-century art history is, namely, not only a history of individuals, but also collectives, groups, circles, and (institutional and informal) schools. Academies and universities have made history in that they gather outstanding artists and develop a teaching program. Sites of teaching and production such as the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and later Berlin, WChUTEMAS in Moscow, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the Hochschule f����¯�¿�½������¼r Gestaltung (Academy of Design) in Ulm have influenced and shaped the development of art just as greatly as individual creative personalities have. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avant-garde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.

The significance of the Department of Media Study at Buffalo for the media age is comparable with other historical institutions influence on art history. Its founding came at a time in which there was no academy or institute dedicated explicitly to an art of all media, and, at the same time, also included theoretical and cultural analysis as part of its curriculum. Those involved were pioneers, the first who taught and did research against the backdrop of a constantly changing concept of the image between photo, film, video, and digital image and therefore joined in carrying out the changeover from the space-based arts to the time-based arts (such as music) and the transformations of art practice thus implied.