Towards Intuition: An American Landscape

Having created a set of works on analogue video between 1976 and 1980 VIDA decided to go to the United States to drive across the dream of America in search of the source of intuition. The US had provided not only Americans but people around the world - such as them, three British people - with a promise of improvement, not only of their circumstance, but of themselves. As a sometimes musician, poet, writer and painter, one of its members Terry Flaxton became familiar with the use of improvisation to create various artefacts and moments and recognised that element when constructing moving images on a timeline into an act of durational statement.
As members of London Video Arts, VIDA swapped tapes with the Bay Area Video Coalition and was familiar with experiments in other countries work in that area. It seemed natural to go in a spirit of discovery within the landscape of America in the hope of finding the source of several ideas that might be located in the same place. They found various performers and eventually a healer who could speak about the furthest outpost of the improvisatory faculty who had adopted their behaviours and could cast off into an intuitive space and having achieved that then come back to articulate what that faculty was about. In this search, they, three English people (and child Timothy), also had to leave behind fixed opinions and attitudes and try enable a way of dissolving themselves and culture in America’s culture and landscape.