Context of the MindFrames Research Database

The outstanding importance of the ZKM OASIS database within the MindFrames exhibition (hereinafter: the MindFrames research database) consisted in the compilation and presentation of works and documents from the early days of Media Art in the US that are otherwise not available.

In order to emphasize the status of OASIS as a resource, we shall briefly outline the contextual framework of the exhibition: The MindFrames exhibition celebrates a unique »setting«, namely a geographical and temporal situation in which a mixture of brilliant avant-garde filmmakers and video artists came together under the directorship of a media visionary and established the first Media Art Department at a university. At a time when there were no other colleges dedicated explicitly to media art and the theoretical analysis of the subject as part of the curriculum, Gerald O'Grady founded the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo [SUNY, Buffalo] in 1973. In the 1970s and 1980s, the entire range of media art (from photographic image to slide installation, from music to film and video performance, from film to film installation, from videotape to video environment, from computer graphics to interactive installation) was researched, realised and taught there by now canonised Structuralist avant-garde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, and legendary video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka as well as Peter Weibel. All the members of the Buffalo Faculty were not only practicing artists, but also able to theoretically underpin the artistic trends and issues in their respective medium by means of lectures, essays, and publications.

Thanks to the MindFrames research database by way of a digital archive, different media art forms and formats are now accessible to the broader public – along with documentary and experimental films, video art and installations, as well as text-based documents such as sketches, notes and documentary materials.

Poster announcing the MindFrames exhibition at ZKM

→ Back to the MindFrames Research Database of ZKM Karlsruhe.